We Quench a Little Tenure Thirst.

A number of folks weighed in on yesterday's thirsty concerning tenure. A number of folks without tenure hollered things like - "DON'T LEAVE...HANG IN THERE...TENURE *is* THE GRAIL." That sort of thing. But since the thirsty t-t-er wanted to hear from tenured folks, we limited the pool and chose the following posts for some flava:

• Not only did I set a tenure clock back, I gave up tenure completely in order to move into a "better" situation. Everyone told me not to do it, but I simply wanted new challenges. It wasn't easy, and part of the challenge was convincing other schools that I wasn't some raving lunatic. "You HAVE tenure?" they always asked at interviews as if I was turning a golden goose into the street. The truth is that tenure is delicious. It was a freeing couple of years after I first got it. I fought hard in the academic senate, did what I knew was best for my department, and the safety of tenure helped me be a better prof. But in the end I felt lost in the town and the institution, and I just wanted different grass...not necessarily greener. So, while you have invested some time at your institution, I don't think setting a tenure clock back should stop you. If you want to accomplish something else, go somewhere else, letting go of those dreams and slouching toward tenure is never going to set aside that gnawing "What if?" that will follow you.
  
  


• The value of tenure is a confusing topic to those who don’t have it, but essential to the functioning of the academy. When educators become at will employees they lose the freedom to address controversial and challenging topics with their classes. Yes, you can do this without tenure, but you are always under the Doom of Damocles if a student complains or the Dean has a differing view of the world than you. Tenure doesn’t protect you from being fired, it just protects you from being fired without an actionable cause (insubordination, failure to do your job, etc.). For a truly good career move it is valid to reset the tenure clock, but it isn’t taken lightly.
  
  


• I faced exactly your choice 23 years ago. I was happy enough at a non-PhD program where I knew I'd get tenure but got the chance to move to one of the top programs in my field where tenure was not at all assured. For me the choice was easy: I asked myself whether, when I was 50, I'd rather look back and know that I'd had the chance for the big time and was afraid to take it, or that I'd taken a risk and had failed. I knew I wanted to take the risk: I'd rather risk failure than know I was afraid to try. It was pretty stressful for a few years and for a while it looked like I wasn't going to make it, but then things fell into place and I earned tenure. So as it worked out, I got what I wanted and I've been very happy. But I did not know it would work out when I made the choice. I knew I had skills that would make me employable if an academic career didn't work out and my spouse (who left a job to move with me) also had marketable skills; we made the decision jointly and knew what we'd do next if the risk did not pay off and I did not get tenure.
  



• While I was an assistant, I spent a lot of time looking for better jobs and once came very close to moving up to an R1 from my regional school. Over the last fifteen years, I have watched that R1 department hire and then fire or drive out five different people. So, jumpers beware. After I got tenure, I applied for a few things and was even offered a job in the part of the country I come from but just couldn’t see that it was going to make my life that much better so I stayed put. I’m not sorry. I’m a full prof who’s been at the same place now for twenty years. I work in a collegial department at a university without too much administrative bullshit. My students are average to good & I teach a nine hour load, usually with two preps. I have a lot of autonomy – choose my own books for intro classes, choose when I teach, etc. – and that autonomy makes me more willing to put in service on committees, faculty senate, and other things that contribute to the institution. On the other hand, I have very few majors, no graduate students, and not many colleagues in my academic area. I’ve probably done less publishing than I would have in a more high-powered place. When I go to conferences I don’t need to be ashamed of my work, but sometimes I feel as if I gave up on ambition in favor of comfort; on the other hand, now that I’m less than ten years out from retirement (if the market rebounds a bit) comfort doesn’t look so bad. (If the market doesn’t rebound, they’ll haul me out of my office tits-up one fine day because they can’t fire me.) Oh, and don’t give me any of that deadwood crap unless you’re talking about the TV show – I work hard as a teacher and bring new material to my classes every time I teach them. Finally, I’m now in a position to assist younger colleagues navigate the eddies and shoals of the tenure process. I am amazed at the intellectual vitality and enthusiasm of my younger colleagues and if I manage to get them to stick around after I leave, that will be a legacy I can be proud of.
  
  


• First, remember that a big part of the mystique of tenure is that if you *don't* get it, you're out of a job. And beware of the "grass-is-always-greener" syndrome. But if you think you're being pretty rational about the relative benefits of the new job, and if you think you'd have at least as good a shot of getting tenure there as where you are, there is not much to lose by applying. You say you've "found another job"--have you applied, have you been interviewed, or do you already have an offer for that job? I always say go ahead and apply--you'll know a *lot* more about the cost/benefit comparison after an interview, especially with some years of T/T experience already behind you (giving you a better idea of what to look for, and making you much more aware of warning flags than you were a few years ago.) Don't be a dilettante, but be willing to take a risk and go for something you want.

Oh So Many People Want This Place to Be Called RateYourStudents AND AnyColleagueWhoEverPissedYouOff.

Nancy Nincompoop:

Every year we have the same conversation soon after the term starts. You've got some clever people who will do well once they graduate and start working. Unfortunately, you also have a large number of untalented work-shy idiots and, when required to make even the minimum of effort to get something done, they come into your office and whine about how horrible I apparently am. After all, they're all such gifted geniuses, aren't they? The slob work they turn in to me is a good example of their abilities. Sadly, those are the ones you choose to listen to and the reason why I get those telephone calls in which you sound like you'd like to tear my head off.

You're a fellow member of my profession, so you should know what's expected of them out there. Why, then, do you insist that they deserve to graduate? Are you afraid that if you actually failed anyone that you'll get a call from the dean? On the other hand, what's wrong with the companies that hire them? Are they that desperate that they'll even take your graduates, particularly the bottom-feeders?

Remind me again: when did you say you're retiring?

~-~

Milky Mel:

You're a spineless milquetoast. You let your students run amok and treat you like a doormat while you look the other way and pretend that nothing's wrong. Considering the example that you set by that, it's no wonder that I need to be a qualified lion tamer to deal with them. Oh, I forgot--you've got a year left before you retire, don't you, so why should you care what happens after you're gone, right? And let's not forget that tried-and-true excuse about your hands being "tied" by the dean's office, so I guess it's all right that they behave like hooligans in my courses.

By the way, your designated successor is even more inept and a greater poltroon than you. Under his administration, your department will slide into a complete state of anarchy and he will do nothing to stop it. After all, he got the job by virtue of seniority and not because he had any demonstrated leadership abilities. The way he conducted a certain course was a good example of that.

Have a nice retirement.

~-~

Easy Earl:

Is it any wonder that the students don't respect me when you don't either by overruling me each time they whine? What's the point in teaching them anything when you make sure they'll graduate anyway, whether or not they actually passed my course? And then you manipulate the curriculum as it suits you. I mean, really! A full-term course in which you want the most advanced concept to be tying one’s shoes when the course outline--which you signed, by the way--specifically states that there are topics such as becoming a lion’s tamer that must also be covered?

More important, how did they manage to get accepted into your department to begin with? Oh, right, I forgot that there's such a high demand for your graduates that anybody who finishes will be guaranteed a job. That makes for some very impressive statistics for the next meeting with the advisory committee, doesn't it? A high graduation rate will result in more funding, won't it, and it'll give you more bragging rights with your fellow department heads.

~-~

Loose Lily:

I'm glad I'm not teaching your students. They're either goofing off in the hallway by playing basketball or they're busy trying to get into each other's pants, presumably because you're not keeping them busy. How do I know they're playing basketball? One of my classes was disrupted one day by them making noise and, when I stepped outside to investigate, I was nearly smacked in the head by the ball. And then there was the time they made so much racket with their antics that our department secretary started complaining. I had to go and yell at them to get them to stop, and the little twits where aghast that I had the audacity to raise my voice at them for behaving like such jackasses. Meanwhile, neither you nor your other instructor were anywhere to be found on both occasions.

They're *your* students, *your* responsibility, so you should keep them under control--don't make them someone else's problem. You're an alumna of the same department you're now heading, so you should know what it's like. Oh, I forgot--you're busy planning your next trip to some sort of convention in your area of expertise, whatever that is. It must be nice getting the institution to pay for your sitting by some pool side for a few days in, say, Florida while the rest of us remain behind and have to deal with the little terrors you couldn't be bothered to discipline. Ah, but disciplining them might damage their delicate little snowflake egos and it's oh-so-stressful for you to do that, isn't it?

Bella's "Dear Mom" Routine Goes Over Badly For This Reader.

Dear Bella,

You've done it. You have become a helicopter proffie. You know way too much about your students' personal lives. You're not a therapist or a social worker, and you are not their mommy. You are however pretty gullible as you seem to assume the veracity of the sad stories your charges produce for you. Stop wasting your time (and theirs) trying to be something you are not.

Spend more time preparing for class or grading papers or just get out and have a life. If you really want to you can get involved in campus committees or programs that address issues around problems students have coping with fucked up families. Just keep this separate from your teaching.

This Week's Big Thirsty Focuses on Tenure. How Delicious Is It?

I'm 4 years into a 6 year tenure clock and I've found another job I want instead.

I know this is stupid and all that, but I'd like to move up to a better school, one with a slightly better teaching schedule, and one closer to where my family is.

But I worry because the new position will effectively add 3 years to my tenure clock. And it's not as if I'm unhappy where I am now.

I've never been overly wowed by the idea of tenure, but my colleagues treat it as if it's the holy grail. It seems to me that maybe after tenure I'd relax more, maybe not worry so much about pleasing the "customers," but I wanted to tap your resources to see what some of your tenured members would say.

Q: What are the real benefits of tenure, and is getting there worth it...even if you're not 100% sure you want to stay at your college forever? Am I fool to consider turning the tenure clock back?

A: Send replies here.

Cool Story, Weary Traveler!

I have just got back from canada and have my paper in my binder and everything ready to be turned in. I hope it does not get points taken off from being late it was not my idea to stay in canada so long I was not driving and had no say in when we would leave. I told the I had to get back in time to turn my paper in and take my mid term for class but everyone I was with had spring break this week so they didn’t care. my paper is ready and I am ready to take the mid term. wondering if it is possible for me to take it tomorrow with out any points being taken off. or when would you like me to take it. I am very sorry and as you know from our meeting I am trying very hard now and am not missing anymore classes. I worked hard on this paper and would feel really bad if I received a bad grade for not being here to turn it in. I hope you understand and get back to me with what I should do.

Some Thursday Hot Links.

• Treat profs as humans? Nah. From the Toronto Globe and Mail.
  
• The sophomoric jagoffs at Spike profile 8 proffie-types to hate. From Spike.com.
  
• The place of politics in the classroom. From the Post Tribune.
  
• Who gets taught a lesson in academic freedom in this mess? From the Wall Street Journal.
  
• Tenured U of Georgia prof fired because of undisclosed sex crimes. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
  
• Our favorite unnecessary news story of the year concerning beer. From the USA Today.

Ben from Boston Gets Baffled and Battered by Batshit Bernie.

Bernard is a non-traditional student in my philosophy class. We focus on writing in this class, teaching students who have a taste of philosophy already how to structure a tight argument, address counter-examples, and generally how to discipline themselves to the process of writing (notes, research, outlines, drafts, more drafts, etc). In other words, we do a lot of writing, and subject that writing to a lot of scrutiny. Bernard claims he's enthusiastic about philosophy. He's excited to be here. Indeed, he's present for every class, always attentive, and turns in every assignment on time or early.

He's also completely batshit crazy.

His writing isn't just bad, it's incomprehensible. He switches voice midsentence. He punctuates apparently at random. He makes sweeping declarations and invokes impenetrable allusions, but never actually approaches anything like argument or analysis. He changes how he cites and quotes with every quote and citation. Oh, yeah, and he cites himself.

No, seriously. Apparently, a few years ago, he had an epiphany of some sort, and wrote... something. A diary? An epic poem? There's no telling from the bits and pieces that appear in his papers, but nevertheless, he occasionally quotes from his magnum opus and cites it with his initials and the year. I asked him about this and he confirmed my suspicions. He's citing his own, unpublished navel-gazing.

This was the same conversation in which he told me he doesn't "get" parts of speech.

I don't even know what to think about this guy. I would LOVE to tell him to drop out, do something else, whatever - just quit wasting his time. Sounds cruel, I know, but for reasons I can't disclose even with anonymity for both Bernie and myself, I doubt he'll ever really improve. Yet, here he is, filling a seat which is reserved (and required) for majors and which has a waiting list.

I respect enthusiasm...to a point. His enthusiasm about philosophy has shot right past admirable and into scary. He has precisely zero chance of succeeding at this major (and possibly any other), and the fact that he apparently has NO awareness of that fact depresses me.

In the meantime, I do derive SOME enjoyment out of his surrealist papers.

"Dear Mom..." Professor Bella from Birmingham Sends Some Letters Back Home.

I know most of the smackdown here at RYS usually revolves around the students. But after I have late semester conferences with some of them, I realize who I’d really like to choke slam to the mat: Mommy Dearest. There’s nothing like a sabotaging parent to ruin a young life.

Dear Mom of B: I know you thought that waiting until your daughter was “away at college" to file for divorce was preferable to putting her through it when she was eight. But thanks a fucking lot. Now B feels like her whole relationship to you both was a big, fat lie, and her grades have started to tank. She doesn't know what's going to happen at Thanksgiving, and she's really dreading it. She feels like you blew up the place she had to return to and now she has no home. Good job.

Dear Mom of A: Your daughter is ashamed to talk about where she comes from because you're on welfare. Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but for fuck's sake, don't make her feel guilty over the way she chooses to spend her own money. They're her loans, so if she wants a bigger meal plan, I say tuck in, honey, and enjoy it. She is responsible, and she's making A's and B's right now. She saves her money for laundry detergent while her spoiled little floor mates are running out to the clubs to booze it up every night. She works summers to save up money to live on during college. So don't make her feel guilty for not finding a way home to visit you every chance she gets. Don't lecture her about using condoms when you just had another baby and are still on welfare--believe me, she already learned about that life from living it with you. Don't try to control her major or her choice of career. What's worse, when you had to either go to work or to school because of welfare term limits, and you chose school, don't bitch to her about how you can't help her because now you have your own schooling to take care of, and if she can't get anymore loans, tough, because you won't sign for them. You're busy signing off on your own. She has a real shot at doing well here. Get off your ass and get a job and co-sign her damned loan. She’s already been more responsible than you were at her age.

Dear Mom of K: It wasn't enough that K left the inner city where he passed drug dealers every day who hooked some of his friends into slinging dope. It wasn’t enough that he's lived on his own throughout high school and managed to get into college on his own, with no help with his homework or his life from you. It wasn't enough for him to get past being hit and yelled at by a drug addicted dad. The kid doesn't drink because he's smart enough to point out that addiction runs on both your side and his pop's side of the family--and this at a school where it's practically offered in the cafeteria. He's making A's and B's. Get off his ass about dating a girl. Tell him how proud you are of him for once. Tell him how happy you are that he's not turning out to be just like you, dad, and everyone else back home.

Dear Mom of G: You're the one I'm probably going to drive seven hours one way to smack. I'm sorry your real estate job is on the ropes now, really. But to continue to take your daughter’s entire paycheck for which she hitches rides on the weekend to work back in her home state is absolutely unconscionable. Here's a thought--do the cashier's job your daughter is doing yourself. G is failing every class she is taking because she is too tired and worried about you moping around your house to get up and take care of her own business. What's worse is that she thinks it's because she's just not working "hard enough," and that if she just gives 150% instead of the 140% she's pulling now, things will get better. What's worst of all is that you told her on her last trip back you'd be "really disappointed" if she did poorly in school. Quit taking her checks and get off your ass. She's only a couple of months past 18 years old.

Where We Commiserate With (or Cackle At) Cory.

• RYS seems full of these humanists, these folks who let their whole self-worth be tied up in how some fucking UNDERGRADS make them feel. Get past that, Cory. I don't know if there are nothing but humanities folks on this site or not, but in the "hard" sciences (I love saying that), we are teaching doctors not "citizens," and we don't waste unnecessary energy on worrying about Lazy Leon making it or not. Either he does or he doesn't. It's a different mindset, and I confess I've had a few good chuckles and cackles over some of those thin Philosophy proffies and their neighbors, the pale and wan English proffies - who are the worst, by the way. It's not YOU, honey. It's them. Sign me Poindexter with a Pocket Protector.



• Stop trying to teach your students; teach your classes. Teach them like a singer sings or an artist paints: because it is a fine and noble and beautiful thing to do. And if once in a while someone is inspired by what you are doing, so much the better. Stop relying on these kids to make you feel good about yourself and, for God’s sake, don’t think you have to reach them. Treat your classes like they are works of art.
  
  
• First, you've come to the right place. Here we bitch, we moan, we groan, we complain. Some of us have workplace colleagues who are willing to engage a good ole fashion take-down session, some of us don't. That said, what do you want to hear, Cory? Should I give you a tantalizing tale of the magic island where students care and essays make sense and administrators don't give in to the pressure of meeting the numbers someone set so we can all know if we are successful? Would you rather hear how it's shitty everywhere because our nation is devoid of students who care about "ejucashun"? I have no answer for you other than any educator willing to be honest will tell you true blue, in the trenches teachers don't just fret the present -- we are terrified about what the future is going to be like. Somewhere inside I feel the next world war will be fought with critical thinking and other countries will whip us with annotations and perfectly cited manuscripts.
  Crawl into the pit with us, Cory. There are no answers - we're all drinking straight from the bottle.



• With apologies to Tim McGraw, you have to "Live Like You Have Tenure," whether you do or not. Cory, you are taking it on the chin, and I feel bad for you. But I learned long ago that you'll simply drive yourself crazy if you don't do what you think is right, and damn-it-all-to-hell to anyone who tells you otherwise. I had tenure years ago, and I thought it was a free pass to the teaching world, but what I learned all along is that I should have taught that way anyway...no mincing around, no fear, no worry. If you're a good teacher and work hard, AND they don't give you tenure, why would you want to teach at a backwards place like that? I have one year reviews new at my private Fla. uni, and I just do what I know is right. No support from the chair, well what can you do? I'm a good teacher and I require my students to work hard, or I cut them loose from this world with a D or an F. I get them back in class the next semester and they tell the others, "This guy doesn't take shit." Or eat it, I might add. Cory, I've been there, my brother. Hang in there. Trust yourself, and it'll get better. And more fun.

Cory from Columbus Is Losing.

I can't think of anywhere else I can say this.

I'm on the verge of giving up on my students. I'm in my 4th year of my first t-t position - though I've also held 2 VAP spots previously.

It's too damn hard to get them to give a shit, to do their work. When I've held their feet to the fire in the past, even in my current position, I've gotten no support from my administrators. I've been encouraged to find "alternate" assignments for students who just blew off the real ones. To give "second chances" to "delicate" and "troubled" students who I knew were neither.

When I try to rally my colleagues about it, they all look at me with dead eyes and shoulder shrugs.

It's easier to let it all go. And when I've done it - very sparingly - in the past, nothing bad ever happened. I let a kid through with a gentlelady's C- last year because I couldn't go through another crying fit in my office, or hear another surely fabricated set of excuses that would rival any fiction ever created. I sat there with her D (non-passing) folder, and just wrote C- instead. She didn't come around. Nobody called me. The earth continued spinning. And I never had to deal with her again.

And this semester I'm tempted again.

I don't have one bit of understanding why most of my students are here. They don't want to work. They don't even care about the topics of study when I let them choose. "Bring in anything you want us to study," I say. "We can make it work with my curriculum." I beg them. I give them steps and help them through it. They fuck it up. I leave them to their own devices and they do nothing.

I work far harder on the course than any student. I slave over their work, showing them ways to improve, tricks to try, things to work on next time, and without fail I get the same shit each time. Why did I take the time? Why did I make them come to my office?

The only way I KNOW I can get them to generate work is to photocopy my questions on a sheet with broad spaces for them to answer RIGHT on the sheet. (Oh, and I take a few pens to class, too, because there are always some who don't show up with anything - except for maybe a coffee.)

I walk out into the hallway to find a colleague to commiserate with, but usually the doors are closed. Young and old alike, they scurry when their classes are over. I ask my chair, and she looks at me and says, "You have to reach them. It's your responsibility. Not theirs."

In a typical class of 30 students, I have about 10 who'll work enough to earn an honest C. There are one or two who do A work. The rest should flunk. But in my first year I flunked 20% of one of my sophomore level courses and I spent the entire Christmas holiday justifying every grade, meeting with 2 different deans, providing paperwork, assignments, grading one essay in FRONT of the dean, calibrating my list of absences with the students's lists! (Lazy Leon says he was there on the 17th of October. Are you sure the X on your grade sheet for that day is correct? Why would Leon lie about that?")

I don't want to do that again. I don't want to have to get on my knees and take it up the ass from administrators, colleagues, AND students.

I used to love teaching. I still love my research - which has little to do with students - and that keeps me in the job. But I feel like a complete fraud sometimes. I go to class with a black heart, with less and less hope. I rev up at the start of semesters, trying again, like this term.

It took them about 6 weeks to break me. We had group work today, where they could get feedback on their in-progress projects in order to make them better for next week's grading. I did handouts, sheets for their comments, a performance scale. I reserved a library seminar room so we'd be comfortable. I got there early. 30 students in that class. Nobody near an A yet. 4 people showed, 2 of them 15 minutes after the start of class. (Oh, and they know where it was, and all of that.)

Those projects will come in next week, and the vast majority of them will be pure shit. And I just want to slap C's on them all, let them go through. I don't want it to be such a goddamned fight every time.

I'm losing, I know. But I don't know what else to do.

Two Students Killed, One Wounded, Sunday Night On Campus of U of Central Arkansas.

From CNN.com

Two students were killed and another person was wounded in a shooting at the University of Central Arkansas on Sunday evening, according to a hospital spokesman. The shooting, which happened outside a dorm, prompted a campus lockdown and the cancellation of Monday classes.

One person was detained for questioning but has not been arrested, according to Lt. Rhonda Swindle, a spokesman for the campus police. "At this time we do have some pretty good leads," Swindle said.

One student died on the scene, and a second died at Conway Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokesman said. The hospital spokesman said the person who died there was an 18-year-old male, but he did not have any additional information. A third person, a 19-year-old male, was released from the hospital after being treated for a gunshot wound to his leg, a hospital spokesman said. The shots were fired near Arkansas Hall and the Snow Fine Arts Center at 9:22 p.m. (10:22 p.m. ET), Swindle said.

• Names of the victims released. Two in custody now.
• One person questioned and in custody; three others sought.
• AP Story.
• University Website.
• Little Rock's KATV.
  
  
  

Where a Longtime Reader Decides to Get All Virulent on Crazzy Carla's Cat-Loving Ass. An Academic Haiku Designed to Sterilize.

Crazzy Cat Carla

The professor who can't spell

"insightful." Shut up.

Ex-high school teacher?

Go back to kissing snowflake

Ass. Big kids play here.

You're right -- RYS

Is a virulent virus.

The cure? MORE RANTING.

Prof. Cougar from Cuyahoga Falls Shares Some of That Great Student Correspondence!

Hello Profesor Cougar,

My Name Is Betty Largent. I Spoke With You A Week Ago Concerning My Grade. As i Told You the TA Justine Told Me To Email You About My Policy Acknowledgment That She May Have Misplaced So I Was Wondering If Could Receice Another One To Fill Out Please. You Also Stated That I Do Note In Lecture When I Do Be In Lecture and Section The Reson Why my TA Justine Haste Down For So Many Missed Days Is Because I Was Late Those Days Other Than That I attednd Both.

Betty

-~-

Betty,

First, I'd like to point out that when you email me you need to use proper grammar, please. That does not mean capitalizing every word. Past that, some of the sentences in the email below aren't even close to being grammatically correct. The reason I do this is to prepare you for life after college, where employers will expect you to know how to communicate professionally. If you do not start to pay attention to this now, you’ll find out what importance it has at a point that is too late to do anything about it.

Second, as far as your attendance goes I should point out that coming in after attendance is taken is treated the same as an absence in my classes. That was stated clearly in the syllabus (Section 3.1). Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about that and I encourage you to make sure you’re on time.

Third, with respect to the policy acknowledgement, I must say that I am not sympathetic to your case. Most importantly, we have made numerous announcements about this in both lecture and discussion section. It is not clear to me why this only started to become an issue for you nearly ten weeks into the semester. When you consider that the syllabus says you will receive no credit until after this is turned in and that you said you'd stop by my office to discuss it (but then didn't), it seems to me like you simply do not care about passing the class. To be quite blunt, I don't believe that it was turned into the teaching assistant and then lost. That's inconsistent with the other evidence from the class, namely your low test scores and consistent tardiness.

With all of this in mind, I will reserve judgment at this point in time on whether or not to give you a zero for all work turned in to this point. If you can demonstrate to me through better attendance, improved class performance, and a mature attitude about participating in the class, I will give you a grade based solely on the merits of your work.

I strongly recommend you read the syllabus (carefully this time) and start working much harder on this class.

Prof. Cougar

What Sort of World Is It When A Math Prof Gets So Many Chicks?

While we've been discussing how hot proffies are, we thought it might be time to pull this song out of the archives. It's "Math Prof Rock Star" from the CD They're Everywhere by the Boston band Jim's Big Ego. We have nothing whatsoever to do with the band, but here's are the lyrics. We've also posted a link to the right in case you want to buy the CD:

Math Prof Rock Star

All the girls in the class room think he's hot
he shows up wearing the sandals with the white socks
he hears them giggling while he's got his back to the class
he thinks he's got an eraser mark on his ass
and all the girls from the hall show up to hear him talk
even though most of the time he's covered in chalk

Math Prof Rock Star!
woo hoo!
Math Prof Rock Star!
oh yeah!
Math Prof Rock Star!
who knew?
When he was young he never thought that he would be a
Math Prof Rock Star

And after hours outside of his office there's a line waiting
full of girls lining up to ask about their quadratic equations
she leans over the desk and twirls a pencil in her hair
complains that the grade he gave her was way unfair
and all the professors they laugh about it and wish him well
but the guys in the class are just jealous as hell

Math Prof Rock Star!
woo hoo!
Math Prof Rock Star!
oh yeah!
Math Prof Rock Star!
who knew?
When he was young he never thought that he would be a
Math Prof Rock Star
He was voted most unlikely ever to become a
Math Prof Rock Star.

And at the end of the day he's got to sneak out the back
there's a stairway behind the machine where you get a snack
she finds him there, grabs him and kisses him hard
he doesn't fight it, he knows he's been caught
and she leads him down to the alley way to her car
it's kind of hard being married to a

Math Prof Rock Star!
woo hoo!
Math Prof Rock Star!
oh yeah!
Math Prof Rock Star!
who knew?
When he was young he never thought that he would be a
Math Prof Rock Star

by Jim Infantino

Phillie from the Plains Wonders if It's Sometimes Not the Market So Much as the Marketer.

We continue to get mail about what we should be telling prospective grad students. Phillie reminds us that the market isn't so terrible in some fields, and that changes the equation entirely. Enjoy.

I don't know what discipline you're in, Captain, or what school you're from, but even though it is a competitive - highly competitive - market in our (non-sciences) area, we do just fine here at my grad school. We're not even ranked in our field, although we nip the heels of the rankings (and they're crap, anyway, just ask anyone who obsessively reads them), yet we have a very, very high placement rate. The guys and gals (mostly guys, it's still one of those fields - sigh) I work and study with aren't geniuses, although they're very smart. They aren't oozing publications, although grad students here tend to have at least a reasonable number of conference presentations by the time they defend. They do fine nonetheless.

Now, are some of these jobs at "crappy" state schools where you get four or even five classes a semester? Yes, they are. Are some of these jobs at - gasp! - community colleges? Why, yes, yes they are. Are ANY of these jobs at top research institutions or even at places you might recognize without prior familiarity? Not so's you'd notice, usually.

Do these jobs still pay you to work in your field of choice, even if it's not exactly as you dreamed it would be? You bet they do.

It can't be that you're just applying to snotty schools, or at least I'd think it's not that, given that you have a whole BINDER full of rejection letters. And I do realize that the hiring process can be brutal. But, seriously, I gotta ask - did you EVER consider that the problem might be you? If you seriously discourage bright and enthusiastic students eager to enter the field from doing so by subjecting them to self-flagellating diatribes about the Unfairness of It All, then maybe the real reason you don't get hired lies in certain obnoxious personality traits that you can't quite keep from coming through in interviews and/or cover letters.

Like, you know, those on display in your post.

An Old School Smackdown - Acrostic Style.

J - It's a shame you never came for extra help even though department policy allows for a partial letter grade bump at the end of the term if you just show up at the tutor's office for half of her sessions. You would have gotten that C you needed to escape ejection from the program for being on probation three terms in a row. The underclassmen were smitten with your upperclassmen worldliness and everything you taught them that you had learned your first time through chemistry. If you stuck around long enough to show them everything you managed to learn your first time through physics, you would have been their king by the end of winter term.

E - I hope you figure out that no matter what you're trying to get out of, telling all of the guys in your project group that you're on your period is a bad strategy. I really thought after the way they treated you when you announced your August billing cycle, you'd have remembered not to try that in September.

R - I'm sorry I was always squinting at you. It's just that the sound of your voice triggers a mental track of the Police singing "Canary in a Coal Mine" in my head, so I have to read your lips when you speak to me.

K - You're sweet and quiet and completely predictable - like a well behaved Samoyed. That's why I sort of feel a little bad for the day you grinned blankly at me while I waited for you to pick up your pencil and do the problem I had asked you to try. I shouldn't have told you to pick it up and do something with it before I picked it up and lobotomized what was left of you with it. You can't help it that you have a nine year old's grasp of math and a 4 year old's grasp of problem solving and that the state of Kansas did nothing to remedy that before they sent you to me.

S - I'm so happy you were failing at the beginning of the term - it gave me an excuse to sit you up front. And I'm glad you stayed there after you got a 92 - because the thought of your hot ass in the front row was the only thing that kept me from driving into a concrete barrier on my commute.

Big Thirsty Replies. Who Wants to Marry a Prof? Not Everyone.

• What’s so hot about marrying a proffie? Well, I can only speak for myself, but I think I’m quite a catch. However, another very smart young lady figured this out long before you did so you’re out of luck, sweetheart. Here’s a tissue. There, there. Don’t cry like that.
  
  


• Well it's nice to have a smart one there next to you in bed after the sex goes south. Other than that, I can't think of a reason.



• Oh God, there's no way I'd ever marry another prof. My spouse is a "regular person," and I wouldn't have it any other way. Two people going for tenure? Two people taking overloads and teaching summers? Two people making the salary that a really decent fast food manager makes? Uh, no, not for me.



• Yum. I married a full-time college professor about three months ago. To add to the scandal, I'm a grad student TA at the university where he teaches. In all fairness, we were friends when I was working on my M.A. and he on his Ph.D. We were engaged when he was hired back to our institution and the deans were all aware of our relationship. So why marry a college proffie? Hmmm...Could it be that intelligence (I'm not saying they're all geniuses, but mine is) is HOT? Or that thoughtful people who live thoughtful lives ARE GREAT IN BED? Or that in between classes I can run up to his office for a quickie? Or that at home I have someone who totally gets the madness of an adjunct/Ph.D student's life, can sympathize about the snowflakiness of it all, and loves books as much as I do? I could go on, but I think I'm going to go get naked in front of the Austen shelf in my study.



• I am happy to admit that I married someone with a real job, steady work, good money. It's a must. He's a brilliant guy, but he's not an egghead. Julia Allison may want a geek, but I just want someone who will listen to me bitch about my students and NOT jump in with a pedagogical response. "You're right, honey. Those fucking kids are crazy." That's all I wanted and that's what I got.



• I dated too many fellow grad students. It was exhausting. When I wanted to go off the clock, there was a thesis waiting somewhere. When I wanted to get stoned and stare at the TV, there was a function we had to go to. Good grief. Have you seen a room full of academics? Do you want to go home to that, too? Not me. I'm looking for a grease monkey or a car salesman or a professional fisherman or a nice decent insurance agent.



• When my girlfriend and I were in that stage of "hypothetically exploring" what our lives would be like together if we got married, we did have a long talk about what it'd be like if I got a job as a prof. "Evenings and weekends could be involved, right? Every year I have to travel to the other side of the country for weeks and weeks to collect data, go to at least, at LEAST, 2 conferences a year that at a MINIMUM will mean I'm gone for 3-4 days. You're OK with that? And we plan to have kids, right? This means you'll be doing more than your fair share of the parenting, and you'll be on your own when I'm doing these things, right?" Fast forward several years and several kids later. Apparently the conversation was forgotten by one of us. When I go to a conference I now try to catch a 7 am flight, and return on a 11 pm flight so that I spend only one night away and am ready to be up at 6.30 am to help with the morning routine. I've abandoned all data collection and tried to ensure I get kick-ass graduate students who collect all my data for me. Even with all this, I still get gritted teeth and glaring eyes. The knife digs deep when I hear her laughing along to the TV, while I'm busy in the study grading assignments or editing a horribly-written thesis.
  
  
  
• According to the spouse: The fun ones have breasts, can stop thinking about snowflakes long enough to hear how your day was, and can afford to pay for dinner. Oh, and did I mention that the fun ones have breasts?

This Week's Big Thirsty. What's So Hot About Marrying a Proffie?

Damn you, RYS. I have been roped in by your various obsessions a dozen times over the past couple of years - even buying that last Britney CD!

But what I'm really angry about is how you got me hooked on the whole Julia Allison craze. What have you done to me? I have a chapter I have to finish, papers to grade, and a life to live. Now I'm hitting all of Allison's many web presences to keep up with her vacuous AND beautiful life.

Her most recent column for Time Out: NY is about the benefits of coupling with a professor. (She recently interviewed Joanne Rendell, the author of the novel The Professors' Wives' Club.) They discuss the apparently delicious notion of having sex in a library on a pile of books! Oh, and these profs she's talking about are all male. Doesn't Allison know that there are female professors...oh, she's dumb as a rock sometimes.

Anyway, for your readers, is being married to a proffie such a good thing? Are they really so attentive that they'll grade their essays and do your dishes? What's up with that? As Allison says herself, "I seriously need to start dating this geeky species."

Q: What's so hot about marrying a proffie?

A: Send replies here.

Raise Your Hand (Okay, Don't; We Can't See You) if You've Got a Little Miss Dipshit of Your Own.

Every fall semester it happens. I get a class full of 13th graders—who are under the mistaken impression that, like Mrs. Grundy in high school, I will do my all to make sure they pass so that I can see them at homecoming and wave and that, somehow I give a shit about how “hard” life has been for them recently. Gimme a break! I’m still six years from retirement, and all I’ve got to look forward to is teaching 7th grade grammar to college students.

Anyway, Little Miss Dipshit finally—finally, after two weeks!—makes it to class, and on time, to boot. The last time she attended, she was more than a half hour late, obviously finishing the paper that was due. Today, she shuffles up to my desk after I’d passed out today’s quiz and says, “I didn’t know we had a quiz today. I was out of town.”

I look at her incredulously and say, “So, what does that mean?”

“Like, could I find out what the readings were and take the quiz later?”

“That would be a make-up quiz. Look at your syllabus. I don’t give those.”

She shuffles, miffed, back to her seat and waits there until I deliver her aforementioned essay—with an F on it. During the rest of the class, she sits facing the wall, with her feet on the chair next to her—exhibiting all the intellect of a fern. She is obviously too daft to realize that all the material I was lecturing on was going to appear on the final—pretty much thanks to her.

It is at moments like these that I take solace in the idea that a red pen can do such a service to society.

"I'm One of Those Gattaca Guys, Too." Whoopsie from Wilmington Willie.

I have to confess I have never felt more uncomfortable reading an RYS post as I was when I saw Greta's Gattaca post.

I have done the exact same thing at my own college, right down to forgetting to tell the sub where to find the damn movie.

Now, in my defense (shrivel) my school REALLY frowns on proffies cancelling classes, even for good reasons. (And Stan's "mental health" day REALLY doesn't count.) So when I'm faced with an unmovable appointment, or sickness, or a seminar I want to take in, I often rely on a movie - mostly (I tell myself) to make it easy on the sub.

But I will confess one step further that I don't always choose a movie that really "fits" what we're up to. I laughed out loud at the instructions Greta got - "What sociological questions does the movie raise?" Yes, that will just about suffice for anything right? Ahhhh, and I've done that, too.

Yikes. I used to think this site made fun of others only, but I got skewered by Greta, and I know now that I've got to find some other assignments for next time I can't be in class...

I may be embarrassed, but I'm not ungrateful.

Confusion in Bowling Green.

I'm a prof at WKU, which you featured - unfortunately - on your site yesterday. I was on campus during the lockdown, and the students who were with me were legitimately frightened by the way the administration and the local police handled things.

I don't know if you're going to cover the aftermath, but our excellent WKU Herald has an excellent story on things, and an absolutely chilling photo that I can hardly believe.

I hope you'll take the time to post this as I think it has real value for academics everywhere.

My thanks,
Kirk from Kentucky

photo credit: Bryan Anselm, WKU

Ladies and Germs, We Give You Cat Crazy Carla.

Dear Francis,

I am disgusted by your blog. I only learned about it by reading one of my favorite academic bloggers, Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time.

It is clear from her note and the comments that you plagiarized her blog by not giving credit to her when you quoted without credit a recent posting of hers to make fun of. First of all, you are not the blog police, and you have no right to dictate what people write about. Dr. Crazy's blog is full of useful and inciteful academic information, and because it's her PERSONAL SPACE, she occasionally writes about her friends, her family, and yes, her cats.

I taught high school for 15 years, and then after my husband passed away I went to college, got my MA, and am now a college professor, too. I live with my daughter, my animals (and YES I have cats and I LOVE them!), and I consider Dr. Crazy one of my colleagues. I read her page regularly, and this is how I discovered your site.

First of all, your whole premise is ridiculous, if not illegal. Rating students by making fun of them is the act of a virus, of a real germ. You should be ashamed of yourself. Do you know how many people would love to have the ability or the talent or the schooling necessary to be a college instructor. And you waste your time by ridiculing the entire reason why colleges exist. I wish somebody would shut you down and expose you for horrible person you likely are. Francis, if that's your real name and I bet it's not you should be ashamed.

Now more closely to the point at hand. You've been shown to be a plagiarist now, by using Dr. Crazy's words on your own site without credit. I hope everyone who reads this blog sees you for the academic fraud that you are. Without citing properly my students might fail. You as a professor should know better.

Sincerely,

Carla (that's not my real name, but I bet Francis isn't yours either.)

Michelle the Marathoner Motors to the Midway Mark.

Today I completed my eighth week of my Marathon teaching schedule, halfway home for the semester.

Twice a week, I teach over 9 hours nearly nonstop: 3 different classes varying times from 1 1/2 hour to 2 1/2 hours to 4+ hours.

If I am lucky, then I gobble down a bagel while photocopying, or spoon down a yogurt while glancing through notes for the next class. Some days I don't get any food at all. So, I look forward to my light day of the 3 hour class.

Preparing and delivering for that 4+ hour evening class on top of a 5 hour teaching day + committees, etc, is recipe for burnout.

Now, add in office hours, a community service based ( major ) project, committee meetings, and so on.

Sure, this looks good on paper. Get your teaching done in 2-3 days & reserve that classroom in handy blocks, but in reality, this back to back marathon wipes you out. Try preparing 9+ hours in a 24 hour turnaround. 3 different preps.

And, when the heck do I do my laundry, go to the store, or write that soon to be due conference paper?

Please, class scheduler, I am human. I bleed. I need rest. I have blisters on my brain.

By the way. I am not an adjunct. I am full time. Regular.

A Longtime Reader Tells Job Seekers That They May Not Be Looking Hard Enough.

Daily I read the laments of fellow RYS readers. I read how we should tell students to avoid graduate school because there are just no jobs and that the tenure track is littered with the corpses of freeway flyers spent in their pursuit of long-term employment. When I am done with these diversions I get back to the work of the day and on the top of my pile I am confronted with the incongruity of two open search committees in my department. The incongruity comes from the realization that these positions have been open for over a year, as have several others at my institution. Did we fail to advertise the positions in the appropriate journals? Did our local post office, email server, and pony express rider simply stop working? No, sadly the reason that these positions are still open is due to a lack of any qualified applicants in over a year of searching.

I do not work at some uber-competitive Ivy League school or prestigious SLAC but rather the lowly community college down the street from you. We have a tenure-track (though the name is different), good pay (better than a couple of local Div I unis), good benefits, and a nine-month schedule (though you can work overload if you wish), in essence all you need for a productive career in education. Yet, we still have problems getting good faculty candidates when we have full-time openings. I don’t know if this is due to a deep ingrained looking down at the CC career path (though I went to a good R1 and then a Ph.D. at an Ivy) or some other trivial matter (that school isn’t in the exact part of the country I want to be in), but it is disheartening to see these positions, which can be fleeting in their offering, go unclaimed.

In short, yes there are full-time teaching positions available for Ph.D. graduates, but you may have to move your vision beyond just the SLAC and R1 mentality, or beyond the locale you live in now. Ask yourself what you really want out of your career and if the answer is the chance to teach realistic size classes (my maximum class size is around 40, most are 22-24), impact students who really might appreciate the effort, and interact with diverse populations of students, maybe it is time to think about your search in a new way.

Proof That No Matter What We Post, We Get Mail About It. An Allegorical Angel Parses "On Populars and Pressure." It's Peachy!

Good morning class. Today we're going to discuss "allegory." Anyone know what an allegory is?

Okay, good, that's what the book says. Anyone know what it means? Can we paraphrase it?

Um. A paraphrase is a restatement in your own words.

Um. Restatement is . . . never mind. Let's just look at an allegory and figure it out as we go along.

Here's an allegory that's comparing preparing for high school to university administration. See, the "populars" are the administration. Can anyone tell me why that's ironic? Anyone know what irony is?

Huh. Okay. Let's just move along. We can look it up later.

I think this sentence here could be a good source of class discussion. "she always blames everything on me and she always makes me apolagize and i just feel like she needs to stop, becuase i was one of her only friends and i thoguht her manners and how to do makeup and she even died her hair, and now shes a 'really mean person' im done being friends with her."

If the speaker is a professor, and the "friend" is a professor recently raised to the status of administrator, what does that tell us about higher education?

Anyone?

Fuck it, here's a worksheet.

Conflicting Reports At Western Kentucky.

False reports of a shooting and gunmen at the South Campus of Western Kentucky University were reported widely in the national and local news this afternoon, but fortunately all of the reports seem to have been wildly inaccurate. News changed rapidly over the past 2 hours, but the latest from the Western Kentucky University student paper says in part:


Main campus has been given the all clear, according to an Emergency Management System text message sent at 3:02 p.m. Buildings have been secured, but officials aren't holding anyone. No one has been shot or arrested following a report of shots fired at or near Pearce-Ford Tower, said Bob Skipper, director of media relations. One person was injured in a fight. He was taken in an ambulance, he said." At this point we have no confirmation of weapon," he said. " At this point it's just been a fight.

The main WKU website reports: "All Clear Has Been Issued By WKU Police.
Individuals are free to move about campus as needed. WKU officials say four individuals have been taken into custody for questioning. A news conference is scheduled for 4 pm CT at Mass Media and Technology Hall."


Updates:
WKU News Release.
Five people in custody, but not arrested. From WBKO.

We Get at Least 5 of These a Week, and We Never Know What To Do. On Populars and Pressure.

so people at my school really need a news flash. in high school they are going to get their butts kicked becuase the "populars" think that they are soo much better than everyone else, and the truth is in high school no one takes that crap. im in 8th grade and ive realized that my one friend who i met last year is becoming one of them, but i dont think that any of them like her and honestly i just dont feel like i want to tell her. she always blames everything on me and she always makes me apolagize and i just feel like she needs to stop, becuase i was one of her only friends and i thoguht her manners and how to do makeup and she even died her hair, and now shes a "really mean person" im done being friends with her. but how should i put it?

Grad Student Greta from Glendale and the Gattaca Gaff.

I'm a Ph.D. student in the social sciences at a great university in California. I also teach a class part-time at a sprawling and multi-campus community college. To supplement my "income," I pick up sub classes at the CC fairly regularly in a variety of disciplines. There's a wiki, in fact, where profs and subs hook up, exchanging needs, assignments, etc.

Last week I took over a Tuesday/Thursday class in Sociology, and a Thursday night class in Philosophy.

For days I tried to pin down Sociology Stan about what he wanted done in his two classes. He had helpfully forwarded me his class schedule which listed "TBA" for both of those days. Uh, okay. Finally on Monday afternoon I got an email from Stan:

Dear [Not My Name At All]:

Thanks for taking over my class. I'm taking some long-deserved "mental health" time for myself. I'm going to leave a DVD of the movie Gattaca for class this week. Just arrange to have a DVD projector sent to my classroom and show it both days. I think it'll take that much time. Pass out a sign-up sheet and then at the end of the movie ask the students to answer these questions: 1) What sociological questions does the movie raise? 2) How would you answer those questions? Be specific.

So I had 18 hours to find a DVD projector, and then two phone calls to find out where on earth Stan "left" his DVD of the movie. I was able to track everything down and arrived in class Tuesday. I passed out an attendance sheet and showed about an hour of the movie.

I was also having trouble tracking down what I was supposed to do for the 3 1/2 hour Thursday night class I was taking for Philosophy Phil. He was harder to pin down than Stan. After he told me he'd like me to take the class over, I had been unable to get any specifics. I left phone messages, email messages, and got nothing.

Thursday morning I was preparing for the second half of the movie for Stan's Sociology class when I finally got this email from Phil:

Thanks, sub. I really appreciate you helping me out tonight. I've decided to show the movie Gattaca to my class. I'd like you to spend a little time at the start of class talking about the philosophical implications of the movie - as you see them. Then show the film. They'll probably want a break after that. Then at the end of class, engage them in a discussion about the characters in the film and their motivations. What do they think Jude Law finally believes? Thanks.

And that was it.

I went to Stan's class in the afternoon, showed the second half of the movie and passed out a neat sheet with Stan's questions - that I prepared and copied.

I had dinner and then went to Phil's night class. I had made some notes about what implications I thought the movie had, trying to use my recent viewing of the first half of the film and my second most recent viewing of the film (10 years ago) to guide me. At 6:30 nobody had arrived yet. I had the projector set up, had the movie cued, and waited. 6:40. 6:45. 7:00. Nobody.

I went home. Now I wait to see if either Stan or Phil will turn in the necessary paperwork for me to get my $47.50. I'll let you know.

Tell Grad Students the Truth, And to Keep an Eye on the Future - Uh, and the Boomers.

We've continued to get mail about the recent Big Thirsty on prospective grad students and the job market. We thought this was a reasonable post to continue that discussion. Please to enjoy:

Students seeking PhDs in over saturated fields should definitely be told the truth. The truth is multifaceted though. If they don't go to grad school now/fall of 2009, they will soon face a crappy job market for entry-level, stultifyingly dull 'work' that bores nearly everyone (let alone aspiring snowflakes interested in existential analyses of post-modern pro-gender anti-Holocaust studies). If they go to grad school now, they may finish with a PhD in 2013 or 2014 or later, and who knows what the baby boomer retirements will have wrought. (But who knows what the current economic situation and reduction in upcoming 18-year-old cohorts will bring...?)

Tell them the truth: go to the best program you can get into, with the greatest funding level you can secure, and then be prepared to get out of your own damn way and work your ass into a mushy, desk-chair-shaped squash while you sit and type and type and publish and present and network. And maybe learn how to teach too, because while there may not be enough high-falutin' ideal-type jobs (e.g., teaching almost nothing to a few students who adore you and your subject matter), there will certainly be a lot of over-25-year-olds heading back to community colleges to retrain in professional fields.

Students seeking PhDs in less-saturated fields should also be told the truth, or truths. Tell them to expand their fantasies of their futures, to gather as many practical or multi-site skills as they can, to work extremely hard in grad school (and many long hours), and to consider the possibility that they may need to do something outside of academia.

For what it's worth, I have begun telling my students that grad school will not be like the cozy bosom of the private-college undergrad experience they have been nurtured in (or whatever). Grad school rarely includes students getting coddled and swaddled and cooed at. It can be a devastating, alienating, stupid, bureaucratic exercise in ass-kissing and hoop-jumping. So I'm encouraging my potential graddies to be actively engaged in steeling themselves for this, and if it's a better experience, huzzah. Perhaps if they heed this lesson, the bullshit of the job market (in 2013 or 2015 or whenever) may be easier to hack.

Some Links for a Wednesday.

• The Trophy generation goes to work. From the Wall Street Journal.
  


• Send your old school some money, blah blah blah blah. From BostonChannel.com.
  


• U of N. Dakota: Student gun closet full. From KFYRTV.com.
  


• What's the point of college if we can't smoke, stay up late, and stare at the computer? From StarTribune.com.
  


• On the other hand, Penn students hardly smoke at all. (Are we including weed?) From The Daily Pennsylvanian.
  


• U of Nebraska cancels Ayers appearance over safety concerns. From FoxNews.com.
  


• You mean they'd rather cheat on the fitness challenge than those hard-ass courses? From the Harvard Crimson.
  


• Grad School a place to hide out. From Examiner.com.
  
  
• Some Aussie profs have this to look forward to. From BBCnews.com.

The Captain Wants to Get In a Day Late on the Whole Grad Student Thing, And He Wants to Steer the RYS Ship Back Towards Angrytown.

Call me the Captain from Koepenick.

I have long been in the practice of telling grad students that if they’re in grad school to either drop out or never quit, but don’t graduate. Ever. There are no jobs. There should be no bullshit about this. There are no fucking jobs.

Oh, I know every year schools “post” openings, that attract several hundred applicants, but unless you went to a chi-chi school, have publications out your ass, AND (not OR, mind you) you are the luckiest sonofabitch who ever lived AND you’re either blowing everyone on the committee or you have serious blackmail goods on them, don’t waste your time even trying graduate school.

Any undergrad who tells me they want to go to grad school, I sit them down in my office and I let them leaf through the three-inch three-ring binder of my rejection letters. I have been on the market four years.

“So sorry, Captain, we chose the candidate who shits golden bricks and bleeds diamonds! You with your publications and ordinary PhD degree only poop regular feces and there are no diamonds at all when you sweat during the interview.”

Anyone who advises someone into graduate school should be sent to advise young men and women to volunteer for active military service in Afghanistan, because their chances of happiness are better there.

We Left Lo-Fi Behind When We Started Breaking Shit Into Actual Paragraphs. Link from Lansing Takes us to Task For Losing Our Cred.

do you remember the lo-fi music movement of the 80s and 90s, bands that used primitive and cheap gear to record their stuff? these were hard working, authentic cats who didn't let the slick hollywood or nashville recording studios ruined what was true and beautiufl in their music. that's what this website used to be alike until you went all corporate with your fucking cheezy amazon.com ads and and your pro graphics. this was such a cool place to visit. it was lo-fi, hidden, secretive. now you're like the chronicle or something, a cheery brightly lit palce that just reeks of mainstream whatever, just smells like a total sellout of the worst kind. what ever happend to the spirit of this website. whoever started the page was a rebel. you are all suburban douches as far as I can tell and I for one am not tuning in anymore.

What Do We Tell Prospective Grad Students When the Market Is Bad? Some Early Thirsty Replies to Anxious Arnie.

• When I first applied for grad school (only a few years ago), I was invited for an interview at a prestigious private university. They had arranged a schedule for me to meet with each of the faculty members, most of whom wanted to know my research interests and so on. Except for one. The "patriarch" of the department started off by asking how many qualified applications they get for every advertised t-t opening. I think he was surprised that I guessed in the right ballpark, estimating around 200 applicants. He went on to make it very clear what the job market is like and the other realities I would face in pursuing a PhD. Mr. Thirsty said he's at a middle of the road university, so maybe such a tactic would be more strongly frowned upon there than at a fairly wealthy, prestigious university (where they're not hurting for qualified applicants). But this guy was in a position (long term tenure) to get away with basically scaring off those students who had some rosy, unrealistic view of academia, and seemed highly regarded in the department for filling that role. Could Mr. Thirsty get away with acting like a mentor before they accept instead of playing Mr. Cheerleader until they're committed?
  


• I came out of grad school in 1980, a time about like this for the job market. I spent five years as a freeway flyer before moving across the country to take a pretty good t-t job, where I have now spent twenty years. (I published my way into that job, while adjuncting.) I’m happy, but I wouldn’t necessarily advise my best students to follow my path. Unless that is, they can’t help themselves. Me, I could simply never imagine doing anything else. Many of us are defective that way, but it is that very defectiveness, I think, that makes me a good teacher. (I don’t know about the rest of you.) I realize this plays into the “those who can’t, teach” stereotype, but I think a certain inability to be enthusiastic, say, about bundling mortgages for a living, is a positive trait. I suppose I could have made better money doing something else – I worked for a year as a journalist right after grad school before giving it up for freeway flying – but I have had more autonomy these last twenty years than I could have had in any other job I can think of. And yes I realize that my experience may not be typical and is certainly NOT typical for those stuck in adjunct positions indefinitely. So, kids, don’t go to grad school in the Humanities unless you can’t imagine doing anything else. “The fool who persists in his folly shall become wise.”
  


• Tell them what was told to me: don't go for the degree if it is only a career move. Don't enter it with expectations that you will work in the field. Do it because the knowledge is worth more than the job. I wasn't set up for failure therefore, and was happy, surprised, and grateful when I did get a T-T job, first time out.
  


• I entered astronomy in 1978, a particularly bad time to be entering the field. The Apollo project had been canceled in 1972, and the Space Shuttle wouldn't fly until 1981. Unsurprisingly, I did -not- have an easy life. But then, as in the words of Cab Calloway, who was in an even tougher field (music), "This thing has been so beautiful, so lovely, and so wonderful, and, if I had to, I'd do it ALL OVER AGAIN!" Some of my professors did seemingly everything they could to prevent me from going into astronomy. I don't do that, but I also don't aggressively recruit students into astronomy: more than enough come of their own accord. For those who do, I make sure they know what they're getting into, by telling them, and by lending them a copy of A Ph.D. is Not Enough, by Peter Feibelman. I also gently direct the ones who aren't fanatics like me into my department's more employable programs, such as medical physics, energy engineering, or K-12 science teaching.
  


• Anxious Arnie vastly overestimates his influence on intelligent, idealistic, and inexperienced undergrad minds. As an undergrad English major, I had an advisor who said "Do something else." She warned me about the state of the profession and told me that though she had faith in my skills, she couldn't in good conscience promote graduate school. But I was young, naive, and certain that my love of literature was all I needed to survive. So I went anyway. And now I know that she was exactly right. About everything. And now I know that I would sooner recommend mindlessly stocking the shelves of Walmart during the day and feeding your love of Humanity X at night than I would ever recommend grad school (Walmart steals less of your soul, and it provides more security and opportunities for advancement). But I'll be damned if you were going to tell me that about five years ago. Arnie has his heart in the right place, but with few pleasant-looking options for intelligent, inexperienced, idealistic undergrads, grad school will continue to sound like the sirens' song, in spite of whatever grumblings the more experienced crowd has to offer.

Lupe from Little Rock Shows Some Love For Latin Lawrence Who Got Bummed in Smurfville.

Latin Lawrence, I feel your pain.

I left a PhD program to teach in an independent school. There's always administrative junk to deal with anywhere, but I've been very happy in private schools. The kids are bright and motivated, colleagues are talented, and supportive, and the overall level of intellectual discourse is very high. It is much more rewarding, fun, and intellectually stimulating than teaching your average college freshman class.

Until now. I statred a job this year at a new school. Mistake! I began work in August and in October, I told them I wasn't coming back next year. This place is mad for "differentiated learning." It's Multiple Intelligence Theory taken to an absurd extreme. Direct instruction is practically considered child abuse. Requiring the students to take notes on their own without verbatim PowerPoint slides for them to copy from was considered "unfair." My students bombed the World's Easiest Test despite having the questions ahead of time and having a whole class day of review. Kids were angry, parents called the school, and I started worrying about my job. Nobody at the school had my back, and in fact, nobody took the time to speak to me directly about the issue. It was all behind-the-back griping and dark insinuations about my competence.

The bottom line is that this school is hobbling the abilities of reasonably bright kids to become decent students, because learning is never their responsibility. They should never have to work at acquiring knowledge, it should be spoon-fed to them via entertaining strategies such as puppet shows, interpretive dance, and comic books. As one of my colleagues said recently: "If we dumb down our curriculum any more, pretty soon our kids are going to be finger-painting with their own poo!"

Lawrence, my experience tells me that this is NOT typical of college preparatory schools. I'm getting out of this nuthouse as soon as I can, and I'm pretty sure I'll find a spot in a good school with the right priorities and practices. I'm with you though, brutha: if this is the way the prep-school wind is blowing, I'm outta this profession for good. And I sure wouldn't want to be the college professors that have to teach these helpless, ill-prepared kids.

Poll Results In. Given Today's Job Market, If You Were Starting a PhD Program, You Would...

• Continue on full speed ahead: 36%
  
• Consider some non-academic fields: 34%
  
• Go to Cabo / Maui / Sydney, etc. and chill: 19%
  
• Consider a better academic field: 15%
  
  

Anxious Arnie from Atlanta Has an Early Thirsty on Prospective Grad Students. "Shouldn't We Tell Them To Find Something Else?"

This has been getting harder every year, but this year feels like the breaking point to me.

Every October and November we get visits by our top grad student candidates. These fresh faced kids show up, eager to hear about our department, the Ph.D. program, the luxurious grad student lounge, and I find I can no longer meet them and talk up the program in good faith anymore.

I'm an English prof at a very middle of the road university in the southeast. We take in about 14 new grad students every year, and they stay with us from 3-6 years, depending on their program and their ambition.

I used to love the autumn. I used to love showing students around campus, and then talking to them over meals about the truly amazing careers that waited for them. Because that's been my experience. I left grad school more than 25 years ago, got a t-t spot right off the bat, and have taught 3-2 or 2-2 ever since. Tenured for more than 15 years. Great salary. Lovely spot on the planet, all of that.

But my oldest daughter wanted to be like her old man, got her Ph.D. from a better school, and is now making $2200 a class teaching adjunct classes at 2 different community colleges 65 miles apart. She hates it, and after 2 years of freeway flying she's about ready to quit and find a new line. She's gone 0-85 in job searches, scoring just 5 MLA interviews and no campus visits in 2 years. It's dismal.

And tomorrow I'm supposed to tell 6 prospective students that they should throw themselves into a career by joining us, putting some energy and money and the best years of their lives into working on a Ph.D. AND teaching as much as the full timers do. Only to be rewarded by going into a clogged up job market.

Q: What am I supposed to do? I couldn't save my daughter from it. Am I supposed to save these students from it? Am I supposed to do the right thing for the English department budget and win these people over? Shouldn't I say, "The system is corrupt. Do something else while you're young"?

What should we be doing?

A: Send replies here.

Latin Lawrence Labors at Los Arboles. One Reader's Private High School Experience. Smurfville Goes Sour.

Three years ago I was given the opportunity to teach Latin part-time at a local private school, a cool place where the students and faculty were encouraged to bond closely and live in peace and harmony (in other words, your basic hippie commune minus some of the pot...and with grade reports). Let's call this land where unicorns frolic and shit rainbows Los Árboles, though, because of the school colors of blue and beige [not white, too embarrassingly racist for such a liberal school, I suppose], I like to also refer to it as Smurf Village.

I'd never taught high school students before. I jumped in head-first, however, and survived my first year, but barely. Apparently, I was third in a long line schmucks who had been offered this position and who had quit because of the absurdity of it all.

The text they used was Wheelock's Latin, a college Latin summary in forty chapters that makes college students cringe, cry and gnash their teeth. Wheelock's is a fine review for those who have had some HS Latin, but as a teaching text leads MUCH to be desired - it makes learning calculus seem like a pleasant activity for a sunny summer day to most students, and expects much of the average high school student who was lightly dusted with a very limited idea of English grammar sometime in the middle school years. Still, I had taught this text enough that I knew it inside and out, and knew how to make it as bearable as I could with supplemental stories and the like. Still, compared to Spanish, Latin was a hard sell to most students, and I knew I had my work cut out for me.

The grammar-based approach that Wheelock espouses can be brutal to students - it starts easily, then they are quickly overwhelmed with charts and paradigms with now real connection, it seems, to the idea of language - most simply give up , learn the charts and muck through, happy for a 'C'. They end up hating the language, and I cannot blame them - but this was the hand that I was dealt, and there were no other resources for them - no language labs, no tutors (even peers). By the end of my first year I was exhausted and seriously contemplated going no further down this path like the teachers before me.

Here's the thing, though - I found I really enjoyed teaching high school students. In many ways, they are "precious snowflakes" (more on that later), but they were also not yet entirely crushed by the meat-grinder education system that is present in America even in its private schools. I was used to blank or antagonistic stares, students coming in late or not at all, an overall sense of apathy from the majority of my classrooms in college. In high school, on the best of days they were enthusiastic and eager to learn - true students, that is. For that reason, I signed up for the next year.

However, the Latin department head (and by that I mean the only one of us who mattered) decided to change the textbook for my second year. No input form me, of course. The text I was introduced to DAYS before school started was hands-down the worst text I've ever had the displeasure to use. The department head admitted to me that, due to pressure from administration to change the Latin curriculum to something more 'student-friendly', he had picked this book in spite, essentially because it had color pictures! Yet again another tumultuous year in Latin, with me becoming familiar with the new text and spending every spare minute it seems coming up with online exercises for the students (the texts web-site promised vocabulary and review quizzes 'Coming soon!' for over a year and half, and when they did materialize, they were worse than having none at all).

My second year review of performance came. Administration let me know that they had been hearing a lot of negative comments from parents, and that they were concerned about my future at the school. I admitted that I had felt overwhelmed. Administration was also concerned that I was not fitting in at the school - I didn't seem to come out of my office and play with the other faculty like everyone else. Never mind that I was often grading Latin homework, creating online quizzes and exercises, grading extraordinarily bad papers AND, to top it off, attempting to begin work on my reading list and master's thesis. To show that I was serious about integrating myself more fully into the school, I made a bold decision - I was effectively putting aside my studies for the coming year so that I could focus on teaching at Los Árboles, and I asked to lead a student advisory team as well. All seemed well.

It was about this time that administration discovered the ideas of multiple intelligences and the latest in theories of the teenage brain. Yes, no member of administration had ever taken an education class before. The head of the upper school was a failed PhD candidate in History who 'really cared for the kids', cried at the drop of the hat at anything remotely emotional and was as relentlessly cheerful and upbeat as Rainbow Brite on meth. His assistant was someone I had begun to look to as a mentor, the only one that I could find. She too was relentlessly and aggressively optimistic, and was given to reading the most god-awful twee poetry at morning meetings. She was new at her position and took it seriously, but was as clueless as the rest of admin was, and in truth did not have the backbone to be a good administrator - she seemed to wilt at the slightest criticism, and was wishy-washy when she should have been firm. She was like a clueless but well-meaning grandmother who occasionally dispensed helpful advice but ultimately muddled things more than they had been before.

Needless to say, every faculty meeting became an endless parade of the latest in learning theory - never mind that most of the faculty had either already been immersed in this via the state licensure program or had picked it up as they taught as professional development. I had not formally been introduced to any of this, but was familiar with 'multiple intelligences' learning and had tried to implement it in my classroom as much as I cold. Over the summer going into my third year I had worked very hard to incorporate changes into my Latin curriculum. I was hampered by the simple fact that I was stuck with that awful text that had been thrust upon me. Since I had been there I had argued that we would best serve our students by changing to a 'reading' approach - there were many excellent texts that we could choose from, each with great online and ancillary support, texts that would engage the students in learning the language as a language and not as some mysterious code they had to solve in two years in order to move on in their studies. Each year there, I was shot down by the department head (who listened to no one but himself anyway).

By the start of the third year I thought I had at last found my stride. Naturally, it all went to hell in a hand-basket within the first six weeks. The department head, it seems, had fallen six chapters behind in his teaching in the previous semester, and had neglected to inform the remainder of the department of this. Naturally, I received the bulk of his students in my Latin IIs, which threw off everything I had meticulously planned for the year. I devoted extraordinary amounts of time for review, and in the end over 80% of the class failed a simple review exam I gave six weeks into the semester. Though I gave a makeup exam later with the higher of the two grades counting, the damage had been done. The students were morose and uncooperative. I was determined, however, that I would not have another year of sullen looks and apathetic classes. I let my students know exactly what had happened, that the system had failed them, and that I was willing to do whatever I could to get them to succeed in this class so long as they were willing to put forth effort. The extraordinary happened - three weeks from that exam at mid-term, grades were mostly A's and B's, and though I cannot say that every student was thrilled to learn Latin, I could at least say that they respected me more than any class had before, and more importantly, they trusted me to see them through the class. All my improvements for the year, however, were decimated by this - fun projects were out the window, as I was bound to be sure they completed the material that had to be covered for the class.

Though I had an inauspicious start, I was on cloud nine during that time - at last, things seemed to be starting to go my way. My Latin I classes were going extremely well - unaffected by the fallout from the department head's fuckup, I at last could introduce interesting projects, conversational aspects to the classroom and in general, make the Latin experience at Los Árboles fun for the first time in many years. When it came time for my third-year review in November I was upbeat, enthusiastic and raring to talk about my plans for future years at the school.

Naturally, I was told that, at least tentatively, my contract would not be renewed for the year to come. Too many calls from parents, it seems. Never mind that these same parents were the problem 'monster' parents of the school, the ones that gave every teacher grief for not accommodating their 'precious snowflakes'. Never mind that the 'precious snowflakes' that had urged their parents initially to complain I had won over and were now for the most part in the 'A' and 'B' range. Never mind that some of the monster parents had recanted their earlier belligerence when this had happened. I was devastated. Being one not to mince words, I let my students know the situation, turned it into a 'teachable moment' if you will, a lesson in power and the consequences of it wrongly wielded. Both of my Latin IIs wrote letters to administration urging me not to be let go; I continued to teach, ending the semester with the best grades in Latin II that the school had ever seen - but their minds were made up. It was made clear to me in a second meeting in February that none of that mattered - no matter what good I had done, there had simply been too much report of bad, even if it was later recanted. That May I left, my legacy embittered students and angered faculty, many of whom sympathized, wanting to speak out but fearful for their jobs.

So what's the point to all this? All I feel is used and to some degree used up. Never again will I buy into any sort of idealism at any school - a natural and sarcastic skeptic to begin with, I sold myself out, let myself be wrapped in the deadly soft blanket of 'community' that Los Árboles sold me, its students and their parents. In the end, I got shanked for being exactly what they wanted at least on paper for me to become, a caring, conscientious shepherd to their flock.

What I have learned is that becoming a great teacher is a process - it certainly does not happen overnight, especially when resources for mentorship are not provided and careful design of curriculum to mesh with the philosophy of the institution is ignored. My only consolation is the knowledge that they threw away an opportunity for greatness for their school when they tossed me out with the bathwater - I firmly believe that had I been given full rein to teach my subject as it is best taught, they would have a thriving program with happy kids and therefore, happy parents. Their loss. For now, it's back to finishing that degree - and I am planning on taking the plunge and getting state teacher licensure. Hell, if all public schools care about is how well the student score on exams, it'll be a walk in the park compared to the BS I went through in Smurfville.

Louise From Lakeside Lets Loose on Her Liars.

Enough with the stupid lies. I've had it. At first, I gave you the benefit of the doubt when you told me that you couldn't come to class because you had a job interview callback, or an ROTC informational meeting, or because you had to take your roommate to the E.R.

You missed important classes, tests and/or presentations and sent me your email excuses. I believed what you wrote, and I let you make up the work. You were so genuine, so polite, so willing to do what ever it would take to make up what you missed. I empathized with your difficulties being in two places at once.

But this year, I wizened up and decided to start checking up on you. I began to ask questions. So, who was the ROTC officer you met with? Who exactly did you have the job interview with? What are their phone numbers and email addresses? What hospital did you rush your roommate to? Please bring me the discharge papers. And it has turned out to be the case every time that you have lied to me. I know this because you can't provide any proof that your story is legit. You have no contact information to share. No business cards, no email addresses. No paperwork. Nothing.

What really gets me is how you embellish your stories. The lies get bigger and bigger. And you do it with such polish, as if generally accustomed to getting your way through such lying and storytelling. I've always suspected that students often lied to me in order to get my OK to make up work. But now that I KNOW you are lying to me, I'm as mad as hell and I'm dead tired of dealing with this in a"professional" manner.

I can only see one way out. I want my own"Daily Show" so that I can make fun of you in the same way Jon Stewart makes fun of public figures caught lying. I want to roll my eyes. I want to show hidden video of you sleeping juxtaposed to imagined video of you doing whatever worthy thing you claimed to have been doing instead of taking my tests.

I would do to you what Jon Stewart does to people who lie: I'd call you out in front of the world and put it on YouTube so no one, least of all me, ever forgets.

Edna in Education Wants to Say "Whoops" To Twit-Teaching Tim. A Primer on "Multiple Intelligences."

I feel for you, Tim. Honestly, I do. Yet at the same time, I also feel (at least by proxy) responsible for your pain. I'm one of these education scholars who has seen the theory of multiple intelligences grow from a theoretical framework to a literal snow machine. I don't agree with it, but since it's the by product of my discipline (and since I'm way too low on the totem pole to raise a protest that anyone would give a shit about), I treat it the way one would treat the token family drunk or the out of control niece or nephew, whose parents won't control it--with accepting disdain...and ample shit-talking behind their backs.

I can't think of a better case of good theory gone bad when applied. The original multiple intelligences framework offered teachers a chance to think about ways to reach out to tough to teach students, with the idea of getting them on the same page as the rest of the class. However, like most pop psychology, once it was distilled into a mainstream form, enabling educators jumped all over it without bothering to understand it, and held it up as the latest "new" thing in the field of education. More fuel was added to the fire when community college "student success" teachers (the ones who teach what's essentially a fluff course, with lessons on arriving on time, taking notes, and managing time--one wherein everyone gets A's) and private college recruitment officers saw the theories of multiple intelligences as a way to further empower lazy students and ultimately bolster their enrollment numbers.

• "You don't like to read? That's okay! You're a visual learner! You get to watch movies of those howwible books!"


• "You don't like to listen to lectures? Golly gee, then you're not a audible learner! You get a special accommodation!"


• "Talking in class is just too scary? Hey, not everyone is a verbal learner. You never have to participate in the discussions!"

In looking at the syllabi of several "student success" classes at my own institution, I see that these "learning inventories" are usually the first thing done in class after the Kool Aid and cookies are handed out. One teacher even suggests that students take a flier to their professors, not only telling the professor what sort of learner the snowflake is, but how to better make them feel loved and secure in the classroom.

The multiple intelligences Kool Aid has been dished out primarily by those responsible for keeping the student-customers happy (who, ironically enough, rarely deal with the students as students in a classroom), again, further conditioning students to think that their education is less academic in nature and more of a trip to a Burger King with classrooms, where they always get it their way.

Bernice From Buffalo Offers Her Students One Last Wake Up Call. Some Old School RYS Smackdown.

Okay, kiddies. Wake the fuck up. It is mid-October. Sleepy time is over. Here is a list of things that are no longer acceptable in this class:

• Telling me "you didn't understand." Sorry, no dice. It was fine not to understand in the first month. We were all still learning. But if you don't understand now, you're fucked. Take thesis statements, for example. If you "don't understand" thesis statements at this point, you need to seek help. And not from me. I would have been more than happy to help you with this in the beginning. Hell, I even conducted several classes on this very concept. But if you're just waking up now, you need more help than I can give. Not understanding is not an excuse anymore; it's a weakness.



• Asking me what the assignment for [insert day here] is. We have been working off of the same goddamn sheet of paper since day one. It is called a syllabus. It lists all your assignments. You have it for a reason. That reason is so that you don't annoy the living fuck out of me by asking me every day what your assignment is. USE YOUR SYLLABUS. If you've been in college this long without at least picking up this useful tidbit, I really don't hold out much hope for you.



• Asking me what your grade is. It never fails; I hand back those papers, people panic (shock! your thesis-less paper didn't score so well), and the emails come pouring in. "Could you tell me what my grade is?" "I really need to know my grade right now." Well, dear, sweet, precious, baby-doll students, fucking figure it out yourselves! See, that's why I hand things back with points on them. I'm no math whiz, but I have a suspicion that if you add the few points you've managed to scrounge up and divide by the number of possible points thus far, you'll have something approximating your grade. It is amazing what you can do all on your own if you really put that mind to it.
  


• Staring blankly at me during class. Yeah, I've really just had it with this. You're shy. You're tired. It's too early. You're sick. Well, guess what. You're a fucking college student now, and that trumps all your other little complaints. ACT LIKE A STUDENT--IT IS YOUR JOB. It has been your job for almost two months now, and let me tell you, you all are some slow-ass learners. Maybe you can't answer every question, but you sure as hell better plaster a puzzled look on your face to at least make it LOOK like you're thinking. Seems like too much of "an act" to you? Well, I've been up here for the last eight weeks putting on one hell of a one-woman show. Your turn to give a little something back.

Flummoxed Francis Wants Some Blog-spective About Academic Bloggers Who Blog On Fringe (and Furry) Subjects.

I appreciate the careful consideration of blogs, anonymity, and all the rest in your post yesterday morning. (I LOVE the term "pseudonymously," by the way, though my spell checker won't tell me if it's correctly arranged!)

But what on earth do we do with academic bloggers who live on the fringe? No, not the wingnuts with the guns, or even the screaming Mimis who take their Marxist lens to every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I'm taking about the evil cat people. I have two in my own department whose blogs were recently singled out in our campus newspaper. So, flipping to those addresses I find that my two colleagues are absolutely fucking bonkers about their cats. Sure, there are some posts about the election, some soup recipes, and pictures of them and their partners (in Birkenstocks...sigh), but a good deal of the pages are filled with cat porn. "I love [Fake Cat Name #1]." "[Fake Cat Name #2] always curls up with me at night."

Shitfire, if there ever was a reason to be anonymous, that's it. I hate to think of our students reading these blogs and coming to a general assumption that proffies are completely out of their minds. (Listen, I like my dog, you know, but he's just called Rex, and he isn't featured in my everyday conversation, or posted alongside my publications!)

I'm only about 60% kidding. What on earth does one think when you read this at the top of Professor So-n-So's blog?

-~-

FAKE CAT NAME #1: [Redacted.*]


FAKE CAT NAME #2: [Redacted.]


FAKE CAT NAME #1: [Redacted.]


FAKE CAT NAME #2: [Redacted.]

-~-

Oh, and it goes on. I don't even want to tell you how long it goes on.

Note from the moderators:

* The original poster is referencing a real academic blogger, and the text he provided was real cat dialogue from that site. The OP tells us that he did intend to target that particular blogger, so he didn't identify his colleague or link to her site. Nor did he use the real cat names. The OP provided Fake Cat Name #1 and Fake Cat Name #2. Further, the cat photo above is NOT a representation of either Fake Cat Name #1 nor Fake Cat Name #2. It's a representation of a cat photo that we accessed off a Clip Art CD called "Click Art 125,000," and published by Broderbund in Novato, California.

** Oh, and we're using "redacted" in the post because we love how it's used at least 85% incorrectly on the much beloved Julia Allison blog, Nonsociety.com.

*** Oh, and we know that this post is on, like, page 3 of RYS, and that nobody is reading it. But we're just doing the best we can.

Tim from TWIT Tries to Teach Some Tools.

I recently discovered RYS and have been reading through it from the very beginning. Many of the incidents that have been reported are quite familiar to me as I have students / customers / learners like that at Totally Wonderful Institute of Technology (TWIT).

After reading story after story of how shiftless and ill-prepared many of these people are, it finally dawned on me what was really happening and I didn't notice that this had been brought up before. They're not lazy or dumb! Nononononononono! They have (ahem!) "alternate learning styles"!

I kid you not. This is part of the official doctrine of TWIT. I'm not supposed to orient my teaching towards what the subject matter requires, such as the sum of all forces and moments had to equal zero for a structure to remain in static equilibrium. That would be considered elitist.

Instead, I have to gear my delivery towards the learning styles of individual students, whatever they are. If Thick-As-Molasses Jimmy can't relate to the subject matter unless he can color in pictures, because that is the only way he can learn it, I have had to accommodate him. If Shiftless Johnny only understands the material if I use hand puppets or do Bert and Ernie imitations, I have the duty to do so. "Whatever it takes," I was told by a certain department administrator.

No mention that Jimmy or Johnny are to actually learn what I set out to teach and know it by the end of the course. (Hey, Mr. Administrator--remember the course outline? For the course I'm teaching? The one which you approved by signing? The one which we were all obligated to teach to? The same one that was presented to the accreditation committee before it approved the department's application? No? OK, I thought so.) I can imagine what will happen to them in the workplace after graduation.

Never mind that the students outnumber me by at least 20:1, which means remembering that many different learning styles. ("Let's see, you're Mr. Sports Analogy, aren't you? And you over there? You can only learn through finger painting, right?") If I voice any concerns about it, I receive no support from the administrators and am told "That's why you get paid the big bucks!" (Big bucks? The senior administration at TWIT takes great pride in paying the teaching staff at or near the bottom of the scale, and then wonder why there is a high turnover.)

This is what passes for "adult" education at a post-secondary institution.

Rolonda from Racine Does Some Rating.

Dear Q,

You are a stalker-in-training. Stop it. You creep into class, linger over my desk for far too long, and sometimes I turn around to find you standing three feet from me, silently. This is creepy, as was the day you skulked around outside the classroom door, peeking in every five minutes, only coming in when class was over. ("Last time I came in an hour late, everyone looked at me funny, so I just waited.") This is not acceptable student behavior, and it must stop. Get a life.

Dear A,

You are an emotionally-stunted man-child. You throw tantrums when you don't get your way, you spend most of class pouting at your desk over imagined insults from your fellow students, and you become visibly angry when you don't like or understand something (like the time you threw your pencil on the floor and exploded all over your small group members, half-yelling, "How are we supposed to know the answers to these questions!?!?"). This is not acceptable student behavior, and you seem to have a lot of unresolved issues. Get help.

Dear J,

You are a whiny little waste of space. You sit and talk to WoS #2 next to you, singing the jingle to the Subway commercial and discussing whatever drivel you saw on MTV last night while the rest of the class tries to ignore your raccoon-eyed, fake-baked, make-up-caked presence. When I separated you from your crony, you spent the class leaning back in your desk, shooting me nasty looks, and pouting, while snottily informing your befuddled group members, "I didn't read, so I don't have anything to say." You make class worse every time you enter the room. This is not acceptable student behavior, and you're an unacceptable student. Get out. You clearly have no business here.

Where We Let Some Folks Loose on the Whole Blogging Proffie Thing.

• What the questioner doesn't make particularly clear is if he's writing under his own name or rather anonymously or pseudonymously. That happens a lot in the academy, as far as I can tell, and certainly it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes or David Caruso to figure out who people are sometimes. So, assuming you have a blog under "Dr. Dickhead, the Love Professor" or similar, I can understand the catch in the throat when your cover is blown. I'd worry more, personally, if my colleagues figured out who I am than some measly students. Now, if you're blogging under your own name and students find it...well, good for them. They've mastered Google. It'll be no time before they find a way to plagiarize some essays. Seriously, they could give a shit less what you write about. Blog freely. If they do find it, they'll be colossally bored.



• I started blogging way back when – eight or nine years ago – I’m a writer as well as a teacher so it made sense, not that my blog is a big deal or anything. And I blog under my own name, not like all those lame academics who are afraid of their own shadows. (The only reason to blog anonymously is if you haven’t got tenure and you want to dis your school or colleagues.) In all those years of blogging, only a couple of students have told me they had discovered my little online diary. My students sort of know I blog because I’ve talked about using blogs in classes, but to my knowledge only one colleague stops by to read what I write with any regularity. The great lesson of blogging, for me, has been that nobody gives a shit. My online writing isn’t really about teaching or my job or my students – very occasionally I’ll deal with something from school, but I disguise it. I’m occasionally tempted to post dumb things students say or do, or some portray some idiotic, small-minded dean, but, hey, that’s what RYS is for.
  



• You seem to think that a line has been crossed here, and that the students themselves have violated your privacy by reading your blog. But isn’t that a little bit like a student putting a picture of himself at the business end of a bong on Facebook, then being shocked (shocked!) that professors, potential employers, etc. might see it there? There is no “etiquette” here...if it’s there, students will find it.



• I've blogged now for three years, all of it while on the tenure track. I have a pseudonym and nobody, save my cat, knows who I am online. I like it that way. So I have no fear that my students will ever find me. Pseudonymously, I'm able to be a character, someone who is probably more like myself than my professional face, and that's what I think blogging is best for. It sounds like the original poster has got something on that blog that he's suddenly worried about being public. If that's the case, darling, delete the damn thing and relax.
  
  


• Professors should use any and all available technologies - blogs, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Use 'em to track research and keep in touch with colleagues, use them as teaching tools to get your students blogging on the topic du jour, use them to rant and rave if you want. BUT, I think you are completely naïve to expect anonymity on the web. Likewise, you are completely naïve to have some sort of behavioural expectations of your students outside the class (i.e. this "etiquette" of which you speak). If it "doesn't feel right" then maybe your gut is telling you to a) abandon the post, b) tone down the post, or c) come up with a new strategy (e.g. set-up a blog on your own office machine so you get the power of the blogging tools without the public Internet access OR come up with a user ID / password strategy for those that require access to your posts). If it's on the web, it's fair game. Should students have any expectations of professors/parents/potential employers not reading their blogs or Facebook pages? No. Why is it any different the other way around? If you're worried, don't post anything that might besmirch your fine reputation -- that's the advice we give our students.



• I see the point your Big Thirsty guy makes today. There is something about the "distance" I like to keep from my students. I do blog under my own name, my professional title, even using institutional servers for my site. But, the blog is about 75% professional and 25% personal. It had not occurred to me that my students (about 30 years younger than me) would ever be the slightest bit interested in what I had to say. But last year in my large lecture class I saw a student passing a printed copy of a Christmas photo taken at a faculty party of me and my family. It honestly creeped me out. I want my colleagues and friends to be able to keep up with my research and my life, but not at the cost of having 19-year-olds "knowing" me outside of my relationship as their professor. I understand that the Internet is public property, but so is the street in front of my house. If I saw Sammy Student standing out there in the rain peering at my front door, I'd call the cops. I'm just saying.



• Dude. There's a reason you can sign up for a personal blog with a pseudonym that keeps you anonymous, or semi-anonymous, so that your students won't find out about your predilection for knitting penis warmers, having dolphin sex, or whatever other weird ass perversions you might want to tell the rest of the world about on your blog. If you are going to bitch about your students on your blog (and let's face it, isn't that the main reason to have one?), then you need to make sure that students aren't going to find it when they are googling you because they are bored in class. This is not the same as being anonymous to your regular blog readers, you know. People who read my blog and have a little bit of google-fu and a couple of braincells to rub together could probably find my real name if they tried, but students who google me are not going to find my personal blog popping up. They will find the one I set up for my classes, if they spell my name correctly, but it reveals nothing of my rhinoceros-mongling proclivities.



• Leaving aside the obvious point that anything you post on the Internet is there for anyone to read, I like the idea of students reading their profs’ blogs. If the prof is halfway interesting and mostly-literate, it will give the students something provocative and well-written to read, and it’s hard enough to get students to do that as it is. I don’t direct students to my blog, but I have a link to it on my university page (where it clearly says that the link is to a personal, non-university site). A few of them read it, and I have never had any problems or complaints – except that I don’t update it often enough. Oh, and one student complained that it was so interesting she forgot to do her other assigned reading, but that was probably just flattery.



• As far as professors having 'stuff' up on the Internet, I don't see a problem with it--obviously, or I wouldn't write to RYS! A colleague once suggested maintaining a "web presence" as a means of staying in touch with students and reinforcing classroom messages; his blog relates things about reading, English-related stuff (guess what we teach?) and his publications. I'm on LinkedIn--not that many students have found me there--and I maintain a detailed course Web site to supplement my f2f classes. If it's got your name on it, you should always keep an eye on it--like I said, anyone can read anything you post on the net. If it's anonymous, why shouldn't profs have the same rights as any other Tom, Dick or Harry with an Internet connection and basic typing skills?



• How about students who blog about their professors? By name? One of my most precious snowflakes included his blog address in his email sig line. Of course I checked it out. Was that a violation of some ethical standard? Do I care? He published it, advertised the link--why should I hesitate to look? It was about what I expected: a fairly lame, bland, and tame run-down of his days' activities. Except for the nasty rants about me. "Dr. ___ is an asshole" is the title of one blog post. Only there is no ____: my name is right there, for all to see and to search for. Elsewhere, he calls me a "jackass." What's the blog etiquette ruling on that? I said nothing to the student, gave him the C that he earned for the course, then read about how unfair I was to give him a C. I still check in on his blog from time to see how he's doing in his other classes. From his account, my colleagues have decided that he is, indeed, a very special, very talented snowflake, and they shower him with the A's he expects (but I seriously doubt he earns).

"Quit Reading My Private Thoughts. I Mean the Ones I Post on the Internet Every Day." Proffie Blogs. This Week's Big Thirsty.

An unexpected, but not unforeseeable, consequence of my getting a faculty appointment is that students found my personal blog and read it.

On the one hand, I don't post anything *too* personal or criticize my colleagues, but it still doesn't feel right. It seems like a distance that I try to preserve between myself and my students is being breached when they read my blog.

Q: How do you feel about professors keeping blogs, even anonymously. And what do you think the "etiquette" is about students reading professors' blogs?

A: Send replies here.

Why Is There Always Such Outrage Over "Touch-Feely"? Maybe You Aren't Doing It Right.

Please enjoy some flava from the folks who wanted to talk about Quest University and their community-building:

• Oh God. Touch-feely at old Quest University, which I read was once called "Sea and Sky University." I swear I'm not making it up. Sure, it's nice to build community and make everyone feel good, but let us not forget that the current generation of students have had that treatment since pre-K, and look how they're turning out. I'd rather read about a college putting in "Boot Camp Day."
  
  
• Ok, for some reason, this "Community Day" post got me all riled up. Here are my thoughts: Hahahahahahahaha HAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAA HAHA HAAAAAA HAAAAAAA!!!! Oh lord Jesus, this is richer than Figgie pudding! Yes, YES, a COMMUNITY DAY is certainly the answer! Why, oh WHY, did we dumbfucks Stateside not think of this before? I can see it now...(cue harp music) My students frolicking on the (non-existent) campus green, circling arm-in-arm 'round the Maypole, laughing and sharing and generally COMMUNING with the faculty and each other. Trust exercises and games and rap session - oh my! A veritable thrum of love and goodwill unseen since Woodstock will stir the air like the music of a pan flute.
  


• At my Uni, Community Day would actually go down like this: It is announced that classes have been canceled for the day and replaced by the new sporadic tradition of COMMUNITY DAY!!! YAY-AY!!!! Then dead silence. Students look at each other, lips curled in mini-sneers. Eyes begin to roll. They are conflicted. On one hand, they don't have to go to class and risk learning anything, so that's a plus, but they don't want to participate in anything as totally lame-ass as "Communitard Day." Chaos ensues. Where are we supposed to go? Whose group goes where? If I'm part of Class Block B, and we are supposed to follow Block A to Green Paddywagon Station, then why is our Team Leader with the Rainbow Troupe? I'm supposed to be doing the basket-weaving activity but my Playgroup are at the Feelings Depot. And who the fuck are you? Mass exodus. Hip to the fact that the faculty can't possibly keep track of where any of the students are (or even where they are supposed to be) 78.9% of the student population dribbles out to go back to bed, get a twelve-thousand calorie Frappucino at Starbucks, or play Grand Theft Auto in their dorm rooms. When it's over, the administrative eggheads congratulate themselves on a job well done! Oi, what a crock of steaming poo. What utter nonsense!!! Community Day was obviously thunk up by recently-released snowflakes who have been just DYING to voice their opinions on how college should REALLY be run - that is, on butterfly wings and gum-drop unicorns! That the article on the subject seeks immediately to justify the existence of such a stupid idea serves as proof of its asininity. Can't we let our students bond outside of class and save classroom time for learning?
  


• Are you fucking KIDDING me? Team building exercises and touchy-feeling “Get to know your classmates!” group therapy sessions that take away from an already-overloaded course expectation schedule?!?! This is something that only a scum-sucking “Who moved my cheese after they threw my fish to a one-minute manager” middle-administration drone who wants to justify their salary could possible think was useful in any way.
  


• I don't have any idea what kind of students they get at Quest, but my students do NOT need time for a "breather" or "revitalization." Their whole LIVES are about resting. I'd love to have a day on campus when everyone did some freaking work!
  


• I have to admit I was intrigued by Quest University so went to their page. Although my cynicism is formidable, I do SORT of get what they're after. Their site says, "Quest speaks to a bold, personal mission - a journey of exploration and discovery, undertaken by those who are confident and pioneering, curious and passionate, and committed and resolute." Uh yeah, well, sure, that's nice in fantasyland. But I can count all the curious, passionate, committed and resolute students I've ever had on one hand - and have room for a cup of tea. So, yes, do your community-building. Dance around a Maypole, whatever. But please tell us what your secret is for unearthing these creatures who are so brilliantly photographed and displayed at your Eden-in-a-forest campus.

Wait. You Forget to Say Something About Our Moms.

Well, RYS, you've finally jumped the shark.

This latest fiasco regarding Dr. Nothaughty has sealed the deal that all of you at the compound have no idea what you're doing.

This website used to be about smacking down students and freaky colleagues and admins. But your tendency to encourage "dialogue" between lunatic fringes within the academy to promote nothing but discord in some freakish simulacrum of "journalistic" objectivity does nothing but say to me (and a large portion of your readers) that you have no idea what you're doing any more.

This latest game of dodge ball involved a prof who wants to be addressed as Dr. He's allowed. His little "response" vilifying his "critics" and their choice to be called by their first names likewise ignores the fact that others also have that choice. They are allowed. We still enjoy a modicum of ACADEMIC FREEDOM in the trenches, and one aspect of that is being able to choose what our students call us. Why did we need to rehash everything with your "Chief Correspondent" again? Really, do you think anyone cares?

What exactly *didn't* you yahoos publish when you chose to publish the ongoing saga of this train wreck? More meaningless hotlinks to stories I've already read? More job postings that I can peruse on my own in the Chronicle? I know I am sick of the filler. I doubt I am alone.

Seriously? What the fuck are you people doing?

If you're tired, pass the baton to someone else. Or else just get The Professor back to show you the One True Way. Seriously. You've posted 2 posts from a year+ ago in the past few weeks and they were the best posts on the site in recent weeks. If you're not getting decent material, it might be because you've chased away everyone but the nutters and their fans.

The Clue Phone is ringing, people. Pick it up!

- Mitch the Meanie from Minnesota

Closing the Nothaughty Chronicles.

The mail about Dr. Nothaughty has been pouring in. It's a bloodbath, really. We've got tough stomachs, and some of this is even too mean for us. (Well, of course we're not drunk yet, so, who knows?) But we thought we'd finish off this chapter with a note Weepy Wayne sent in this morning. There is Wayne's honor to think of, after all.

~-~

What's the matter? Little Dr. Fauntleroy get his Huggies all in twist because the big bad man stomped all over his Burger King crown? Is little sir going to hold his breath and turn royal blue until all the adults cough up that undeserved PhD?

I'll keep this short. Apparently, if I go over three paragraphs, someone needs to bust out their Leapfrog magic reading wand just to follow along. After I dispatched with the likes of you the other day, I wrote a letter of recommendation for a former community college student who is applying to law school. Last week, I bumped into another former student applying to a graduate Engineering program. Oh, by the way, he said, "Thanks."

See, for newbies like you, these stories are "bullshit." To those who started teaching while you were still squirming under the weight of Lacan in Pointless Theory 101, this is reality. You see, the real learning starts on the adult's side of the desk. They probably didn't teach you that in Dr. school. They just took your money and pumped you full of yourself.

Oh, and another thing. "Robin Williams"? Is that the best you can do? You up all night staring at the Jessica Simpson poster on your bedroom ceiling before you came up with that goose egg? Ouchie. I model myself more as a Sydney Poitier character. Of course, that's a movie. This is real.

Grow up. Insisting that people call you "Dr." to your face only ensures they'll call you something else behind your back. Before you throw your rattle to the floor and call me stupid again. My friends call me Wayne. When you address me, it's "Sir."

On Building Community At One Private Uni.

A reader encourages us to check out this article about Quest University, a very new private university north of Vancouver BC. Here's a little flava. The writer is a proffie at Quest, who also maintains a life science blog. Click the links for more:

Sometimes the best way to freshen up a course is to cancel class: Why a surprise shut-down of the university can promote community
By Annie Prud'homme Genereux

October 9th, 2008
Macleans

One day each term, when the students least expect it, all classes are canceled at Quest University Canada. These days are called “Community Days.” We just had a Community Day today. What’s the goal of this Community Day? It’s threefold.

First, sometimes you just need a break. Quest teaches on the fast-paced block scheduling plan. Students take one course at a time, 3 hrs each day, for 3 1⁄2 weeks. It is an intensive way to learn: students must stay on task and manage their time effectively because assignment due dates come up fast, and before you know it the course is over. You need a breather, a chance to revitalize, interact informally with all students and faculty, not just the ones in your 20-student class.

Second, it promotes student interactions. The morning schedule of a typical Community Day consists of team building and leadership exercises, preferably outdoors. Some of the activities today included trust exercises and the raising of a student-made Quest flag (we first had to dig a hole, then carry a tree log up a hill, then raise the log and stabilize it with ropes once it stood reasonably erect).

Where Dr. Nicholas Nothaughty, Esq. Goes Off the Rails And Explains Who Does and Doesn't Deserve the Doctorate.

Damn, you people are stupid. No shit I'm an adjunct. I know that, and I admitted it in my original post. I know that the administration doesn't appreciate me, because they pay me like absolute crap, don't supply me with an office, and don't provide me any job security from semester to semester. If you couldn't have discerned that I knew that the administration does not respect me, then, well, you probably don't deserve a damn doctorate yourself.

Secondly, don't think that I think that students addressing me as "Doctor" (or not) suggests that they are always respecting me. I know that they aren't always doing that, and I'm cool with that. All I'm asking for is this one small modicum of distinction that I am owed by a system that consistently devalues people like me who allow all you tenured jokers to do whatever the fuck it is that you do when you're on sabbatical. BTW, have any of you geniuses read the stats that indicate that 70% of college faculty are adjuncts? If you didn't know that--and don't think we deserve more respect all around--then you probably don't deserve a doctorate yourself.

And speaking of cool, please spare me the oh-I'm-so-down-to-earth gesture of wanting to be called by your first name. And the rest of you, please stop dignifying that type of behavior. If this website proves anything it's that most college kids need boundaries--and that most college profs are navel-gazing snowflakes themselves. That you like to be called by your first name, confess your political beliefs on the first day of class, and probably brag about toking up at the latest rock concert probably suggests that you don't deserve a doctorate yourself.

Finally, Robin Williams, please save us all the trouble of reading your "Dead Poets Society" romantic stories about how you have changed students lives and about how they skip up to you at random times in your life to shake your hand and give you a hearty "thanks." Stories like that are pure bullshit. Anyone who has earned--really earned--a doctorate probably already knows that.

One Year Ago Today. "Wrestling with Student Tragedy."

Sometimes, tragic events in students' lives can't be overcome, and the best advice--indeed only advice--we can give is to drop the class, withdraw from the university, and find some activity more suitable to the situation.

I know this sounds cold and unforgiving, but consider the email I received last week from a student who has attended only a single class session this semester. Her reason for missing the first five weeks of the semester? She had to attend to her dying mother. Now, five weeks into the semester, she wants to leave her mother (still terminal and not yet dead) and return to school. In her email she promises to "make up" all the work that she has missed. She seems unbothered by the fact that my lectures and in-class discussions cannot be reclaimed. And she seems quite confident in her ability to keep up with the new material in the class even as she is working to complete the readings and assignments from the last five weeks.

She also seems to believe that education is not cumulative and that the material we covered in the first third of the semester won't be critically important to understanding the material we cover in the remaining weeks of the semester. Finally, she seems to think that she can do the missing work and keep up with the new work while she is grappling with the impending death of her mother.

Forget the fact that this student is treating me like a well-paid grading machine, my only real purpose to stamp evaluative letters and comments on the work my students hand in. Surely my role as a teacher is irrelevant. She doesn't need my instruction, only my judgement on the work she hands in for a grade. This of course speaks to her woeful misunderstanding of how education works, but this isn't what bothers me most about her email. What bothers me is that this student doesn't realize that trying to complete a course while her mother is in the process of dying is fundamentally a bad decision.

Her proper place is with her mother and family, spending as much time with her mother as she can in these final days. It's doubtful that she is in the emotional and psychological state to really engage with her courses and reap the full benefits of her education. She might manage a C in this class, but what will she really gain in the process? Isn't she better advised to withdraw from the course (and the university) and attend to this personal crisis?

Listen. They Aren't Always "Hot" Links. They're Just Links. They Can Be Lukewarm, Steamy, Whatever, But "Hot Links" We Reserve For Special Occasions.

• Students face challenges when it comes time to vote. From Time magazine.


• Obama campaign tells students to give their parents "The Talk." From Politico.com.


• Is college worth it? From the Chicago Trib.


• On Palin. From the Hartford Courant.


• Bah Humbug on Columbus. From the UNM Daily Lobo.


• A primer on Ayers. From the Chicago Sun Times.


• How much freedom for adjuncts? From Scripps News.


• Librarian killing in Texas. From KWTX.com.


• Gay friendly high school in Chicago? From CNN.com.


• Some students don't want it. From KIMT.com.


• 500 campus visits? And yet we don't ever remember seeing them come here! From MLife.com.

Where We Hear From the Chiefiest of All Correspondents. Weepy Wayne Checks in From Waterloo.

Dear Dr. Cornholeius T. McBragg,

Let's discuss priorities. You exert 7+ years of cash, toil, and fear for a doctoral, and you're miffed because the kinderpunk won't address you as Baby Doc? Pay attention. You're an adjunct. It's not the kids who are insulting you. It's silverback assmonkeys like dear ole Ike. I'm sure Ike's a dear fellow who's faded blue cardigan smells something akin to T.S. Eliot's armpit, but his endless e-scroll said nothing about adjuncts. Know why? Because it's field slaves like you who make Ike's evenings of sweet reminiscence on the porch swing possible. Ike's evenings are always free. Yours? Probably not so much. If hearing the sweet strains of "Dr. Howard-Dr. Fine-Dr. Howard" gets you all tingly in the nether regions, bully for you. But if you confuse this with respect, you re a fool.

The finest prof I ever had taught at an Ivy. He had a glittering doctoral from a shining college on a hill. He not only published in all those fancy journals no one reads, he wrote entire books no one reads. Better than that, his parents graced him with a name so pretentious that any alphabets in its wake would have seemed redundant. Yet he insisted the class call him, "Al," and quite simply, his class changed my life. He is the reason I clawed my way up here to Adjunct Ridge to willingly accept sniper fire from technology-addled tuition payers masquerading as college students.

In my evening courses at the community college, I encounter former refugees from Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sudan etc. etc. These are people who dragged their belongings out of some corpse-littered hellhole just so they could come to America to scrub the men's room at the local Shop-n-Fart and address their rudimentary English skills in my night class. It's when I talk to people like this that I stop whining about the Ikes of the world.

In the classroom, I see potential receptacles of Plato, Montaigne, and Woolf, or at best, the subordinating conjunction. The administrators hiding behind the curtain see only dollar signs and pay me accordingly. So be it. But when those students go back into the world, it may well be my class they remember. Any respect I receive will have been earned by my deeds, not by some horseshit title. And when I run into them years later at State U, when they are no longer mopping the men's room, but sweeping the classroom floor with the other students, and they greet me with "Thank you, Phil. Your class helped me become a better student," that is certainly more respect than I could ever hope for.

Previously Wayne: 1 2 3 4

Wherein Elgin the Econ Proffie Tells The Rest of Us To Leave the Money Talk To Him.

Hey, Phil 101, the econ profs really appreciate your hard work over there in Introduction to Everything. Now that you’ve tossed your own pile of mental dung on top of the sizable pile of bullshit your students carried into your course, our snowflakes can confidently drag their own ignorance around campus in the same sort of reckless manner you’ve modeled there.

Oh, yes, you’re very careful and apologetic about your ignorance. And you can apologize for farting five times in the departmental meeting, but that don’t make your ass smell good. Speaking of passing gas, it’s so relieving to hear that your students left the class “feeling better”. As long as that stands the primary criterion for self-evaluation, why not just line up your frightened little kittens for a long back rub. It’ll actually do them some good, and the rest of us won’t have to clean up your intellectual garbage while you decide whether to move on to Continental Philosophy or provide a humble oration on the plausibility of string theory.

The next time you get that “scary” and “terrifying” feeling that you’re in over your head, pay attention to the voices: they’re telling you to move on or shut up. And they’re right. Given that you can’t even tell the difference between descriptive discourse and critical thinking, you should be getting this feeling very often, probably at least once every five minutes. Inside and outside the classroom.

Dr. Nothaughty Gets Some Feedback on Names, Haughtiness, and When to Play it Close to the Vest.

• OMG! It was about six hours after I read the post online that I realized I was saying the name wrong. It wasn't NOTH-atee, it was NOT-HAUGHTY...It all made sense and I laughed my ass off in the grocery story. Yes, oh, not haughty one, we'd all like the world to call us Dr. and Professor at every turn, but that's not the way the world works. Worry about something that matters. I've been a Dr. for twenty years and am still usually called "Ma'am," like I'm a 5th grade teacher in the Blackboard Jungle or something.
  



• Nicky, baby…I share your pain. Even though I introduce myself as Dr. Mindbender, and when I raise hypothetical student questions in class, start with, “But Dr. Mindbender, what about…?”, at least half of the little darlings persist in using the moniker “Mr. Mindbender.” My strategy is to employ pop culture and ask these students if they’ve seen the Austin Powers movies. Naturally, they have. Then, I direct their memories to the scene in which Dr. Evil and a UN Representative, played by Carrie Fisher, are talking:
  
  U.N. Representative: So, Mr. Evil...
  
  Dr. Evil: It’s Dr. Evil. I didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called “mister,” thank you very much.
  
  So far, this stratagem has worked nicely.
  



• You note that you are in a hip department where many professors like to be called by first name. If that's the departmental culture then there's a certain norm you may indeed be unreasonable to buck. But the norm is to use first name, and not to replace "Dr." or "Professor" with "Mr." If you want to make the point to your students then make it a point of factual information. First name is informal, and not always appropriate, but apparently it is in your department. "Mr." in place of "Dr." or some other appropriate title is simply wrong. Your students should know that. If you don't want to sound like a dick I'd suggest you give them "call me Professor Nothaughty, call me Dr. Nothaughty, call me sir, call me Nick if you absolutely must, just don't call me Mr. Nothaughty speech." The thing is, if you give the speech you have to mean it. First name needs to be a valid option. If it flatly isn't, for you, then you are being arrogant in at least one regard, because the standard in use around you obviously isn't good enough. Not that you're necessarily outside your rights, but you're stuck unable to explain what's correct because you want to reject part of what's correct without admitting you're doing that. That there, Mr. Nothaughty, is where you run into problems.
  



• I get so tired of this kind of complaint. Aren't there more important things in your world to worry about? Grow up. Teach well. Why do you give a shit what you're called? Ego? Well, that road is a dead end, friend.
  
  


• Quite an intriguing question: "how can I make my lovely students realize that they should address me as such, without sounding like an arrogant ass?" It's like asking "how can I act like a child without looking like childish?" Well, you can't, because acting like a child *makes* you a child. It's beside the point that you deserve being addressed as doctor: demanding it *makes* you an arrogant ass. Live with it.
  



• Dear Herr Doktor Professor Nothaughty. Forget it. Many Americans think that if you aren't a physician, psychiatrist, or veterinarian, and if you use the title "Doctor," you're a fraud. Be glad that they call you "Mr. Nothaughty." What I don't like is being addressed by my last name only. When did this become acceptable?
  



• I don't think it's especially haughty to want to be called by my earned title. What good is all this education if I can't take it on the highway for a little spin?
  

With all apologies to Keats, Urns, English Proffies, and Bar Patrons Everywhere... Academic Haiku Goes Uptown.

Ode to a Round (or three) of Guinness

Thou still unravished beer of Guinness

Thou foster child of chaos and swift stress

Tired colleague, who canst thus express

A saucy tale more interesting than our rhyme:

What beret-fringed undergrad haunts about our table

Of pint glasses and cigarettes butts and more,

in corner booth or the long bathroom line?

What alternakid is this? What cretin here?

What mad pursuit, note my struggle to escape?

What fratastic friends? What idiotic ploy?

Heard excuses are bullshit, but those unheard

over the jukebox worse; ye of the late paper, walk on;

Not to the professorial ear, is excuse endeared;

Pipe to the booth-slouching hordes your drunken tune:

Foul youth, beneath the smoky haze, thou canst not sing

Thy plea, nor ever extension be granted,

And winning not near the goal--yet do not heave:

Penalty cannot be escaped, though thou has emailed,

Forever wilt thou beg, and me be fair!

Valerie the VAP. Inside but Not Icky.

Screw Trump and his wussy "Apprentice" shows -- a 12 week job interview is nothing. Try being on two freaking YEAR job interview. That's the life of the VAP who has a Tenure Track job dangled in front of him.

From the outside looking in, the internal candidate seems to have it made. She "knows" the department and the dean. He's had time to brown-nose and buy cookies for students to get good class evaluations.

She's also had years to be attacked and judged a s "icky" by assholes like your recent "I Like Ike."

To top is all off, the VAP/inside guy has to sit there and watch the whole hiring process take place right in his own office. She's often on the department e-mail list that circulates her competitor's CVs. He's looked down upon if he doesn't go to his competitor's job talks. She can even be asked to allow their competitors to do a teaching demo in her own classes.

Inside candidates don't get the actual interview chances that regular candidates get. Most of the faculty will assume they know how the VAP/inside teaches, so they won't show up for the official teaching demo (which is at the crappy time, because nobody else wanted that time. And some even have the nerve to complain about the time -- fuck them). The faculty also assume they "know" the candidate, so they don't do the meals and the 'get to know you' chats, like they do with an outside person. In regular conversations, the VAP/inside candidate can't be seen to be campaigning for the job -- so when in the hell is he supposed to answer the lame, but common "what are your greatest strengths and weaknesses as a candidate" questions?

Every word the VAP say has to be considered part of a job interview answer. Every class the VAP teaches has to be above average, or some snowflake's complaint will be a reason not to hire her Every intellectual or political position needs to be calibrated so as not to offend the dip-shit down the hall. And -- the "reward" for this job interview -- a junior faculty position, for which she gets to jump through the tenure hoops. Omarosa has nothing on the VAP for cunning, wit and perseverance...that alone is enough reason to hire him.

Really, the VAP deserves a lot of extra-credit -- while the little geniuses coming in from outside were finishing their dissertations and publishing from the safety of their Ivory Tower, your VAP/inside candidate was teaching the crappy classes, at the crappy times. They were probably teaching more students than you are, for less money than you make...and, you expect them to have a similar publication record to the candidates who have been sitting around, drinking coffee and thinking about their belly-buttons -- while the VAP/Inside guy has been prepping classes and listening to you pontificate in faculty meetings.

Truth to be told, you're lucky the inside candidate/VAP applied at all. They know all the crap that goes on in your department and they want to stay anyway? I now a few VAP/inside candidates, and I hope they ALL accept better job offers elsewhere... because, if you think your "icky" VAP/inside candidate isn't on the job market, think again. Finally, watch out for the VAP/inside guy later -- he knows the closets where all the crap is, he's been watching you and your shenanigans and he knows how to oppose you in ways you haven't even dreamed of yet.

Yeah -- I can see the real reason you wouldn't want to hire the "icky" VAP/inside guy... he's had a head start on cutting you down to size -- just wait until he gets tenure, then you'll see.

Nicholas Nothaughty from Norfolk Doth Require to Quench His Noble Thirst, and Thus Wonders, "What's in a Name?"

Truly, I am not an arrogant person. I really am fairly humble. And I'm not being ironic. I went to grad school because I, quite simply, wanted to learn more about my discipline. I finsihed my program on time, passed my defense, and am now out on the job market. (The latter of those three only bolsters my humility, considering that I have yet to land a job.)

I do teach as an adjunct, and even in my teaching, I remain humble. I truly believe that I can learn from my students, and I look forward to class becuase I consider it one of the most thought-provoking parts of my day.

I list myself as Dr. Nothaughty on the top of my syllabus, and when I introduce myself to my students, I tend to call myself either Dr. Nothaughty or Professor Nothaughty. However, despite all of that, I still get students--semester after semester--who address me as Mr. Nothaughty.

And my blood bolis every time that they do that. Since I work in a "hip" department, where so many professors like to be called by their first names, I feel like quite a prick demanding that my students address me as Doctor or Professor; in fact I never do that. But honestly, if I've earned anything it's the titular distinction that comes with having a Ph.D., and I want my students to recognize that. I'm not looking for fame and glory. I just want to be addressed as professor. How can I make my lovely students realize that they should address me as such, without sounding like an arrogant ass?

Fuck Walter. I Like Ike!

I don't often get mancrushes, but I love Ike the Insider. His masterpiece on job search committees was hysterical AND useful. (Examples: Peanutburg, MS; split atoms and HVAC repair; BOWLING ALLEYS!)

I imagine he's a wise old owl at his own college, and he's probably completely overlooked by his colleagues. But I'm glad you gave him a voice on RYS. You let him fly his freak flag high on a topic that is too often shrouded in mystery. What we all need in the academy is some of that frankness.

Those of us already in t-t positions often forget how tough it is on the outside looking in, and I think Ike did a terrific job of shining a light on the cockroaches of search committees -- what they won't tell you anywhere else.

I will add one more item to his nearly perfect list. It's the completely unethical process of hiring internal candidates. I went through this last year at my state school. We were told for months that a long time VAP was going to get the position. He was a good guy, so what the hell. But then I got the call from the chair. "Uh, would you head up the committee? We need an ad in the Chronicle in 2 days." Huh?

And of course it was just bullshit upon bullshit for 4 months. Job ad, review of applicants, phone interviews, some conference interviews, and we even schlepped two poor souls all the way to DampUnderwear, Missouri for a campus interview before we gave the job to Icky the Internal Guy. I felt like I'd perpetrated a fraud on every one of those candidates, and to appease my guilt I pushed hard at the end for us to consider one of the folks we had on campus. I stood up in a meeting with the Dean and said, "This other guy. We should give him a chance." The chair gave me a bemused look and told the Dean that we were all going to think it over.

I heard 2 days later that the thinking was done and Icky had earned his job.

It still makes me feel a little sick.

I don't know if Ike is taking his manifesto and making changes in hiring at his college, but I hope he is. I hope that the next time I get asked to run a con on someone that I'll do differently - I HOPE I have tenure by then.

The hiring process in academe is shady and overwrought with arcane hoops, dungeons, and dragons...and someone needs to say so.

Thanks, Ike.

Hank from Halifax, a Former Educator, Ruminates On, Well, Everything That's Wrong with Being a Proffie.

I am a former educator. I didn't so much leave the insanity of the system several years ago, but escape from it. Reading through the posts on RYS, I was reminded that any resemblance between the educational system and the dissemination of wisdom and knowledge is purely accidental. That's quite a change from when I started university thirty-five years ago. I became aware of how different things were when I returned for grad studies a few years later. Sadly, it's much worse now, but we all know that, don't we?

I, too, have my tales to tell based on my experiences as a graduate teaching assistant and also as a full-time instructor at a two-year technical school. I started the latter with the idealistic sense that I was about to begin a job that had honour and respect, but it didn't take me long to change my mind and it got worse after that. What was I supposed to think when, a few minutes after I officially began, I sat in an in-service session and was told by the "facilitators" that one of my tasks was to ensure that my students didn't have a "negative learning experience"?

That change in perspective was largely due my students (or customers or learners, their title or designation changed at least twice while I was an instructor), though administrative policies and the administrators themselves made major contributions to my decline into cynicism.

Over the years, I had quite a variety of students, among which included such gems like the self-appointed princess who was failing a service course I taught to her class because she didn't do any work and was constantly chatting with her closest classmates. I put supplementary material on reserve in the library only two blocks from her building but she refused to look at it because that place was too far for her to walk to. She failed the course, didn't dispute her grade (at least I never heard about it), but graduated anyway.

Then there was the bright boy who whined to his father that he was *failing* my course with 85% and whose same father called my department head about it. That head, in turn, hauled me into his office to rake me over the coals about it. Evidently I caused the young lad a great deal of distress but his behaviour didn't surprise me. A number of his fellow students told me similar stories about him.

I also had a self-appointed genius in one class who couldn't read the instructions on the final exam, completed 4 out of 4 questions (rather than the "any 3" required), made a complete hash out of all of his solutions, and then blamed me for his failure to make it on the institution's honour roll.

How about the students who whined because I didn't punch holes in the handouts I gave them but were too lazy to go to the department office and borrow the hole punch or, for that matter, actually buy one? The father of one of the whiners was a principal with a prominent local firm which hired a number of the institution's graduates, so, by implication, I had to be "nice" to the kid, even if he behaved like a spoiled brat.

Inevitably, there were the students who yowled when I returned their assignments all covered in red ink because I took the time to draw their attention to important points in their work, though not always deducting marks. (Gee, an instructor who actually looks closely at what students hand in and takes the time to comment on it because he thinks they might learn something--what is this world coming to?)

Students like that were bad enough and I could have put up with them as part of my job as an instructor. My disgust with the system increased when I had some who mysteriously managed to pass my course after failing it. They made arrangements with me to write the supplemental exams but, by some miracle, were given credit for that course when they received their statement of marks. Worse still, I had students who failed a different course, didn't qualify for supplemental exams, and still graduated. Administrative interference? Naaaaah!

I guess I forgot that I should have felt privileged to be in the presence of such mental superiors, the intellectual titans that they all were. I should have burned my degrees in front of them, resigned my membership in Mensa as I was clearly out-classed, and publicly apologized for presuming that I possessed an intelligence higher than that of a doorknob. Rending my raiment and wearing sackcloth and ashes were implicitly expected to follow.

Then there were administrative fun and games, such as the students who dropped out but were allowed back in after coming up with the whiniest tear-jerking sob stories and telling them to a department administrator who was an absolute sucker for such hard cases. Proof of misfortune was rarely required, apparently.

I often spent up to a quarter of my lecture time reviewing and, sometimes, teaching material that the students should have learned in previous background courses in order that I could do my job. Voicing my displeasure to the responsible parties fell upon deaf ears. It was bad enough I had to deal with bad student but bad colleagues were inexcusable.

Then there was the department head who never failed anyone in his courses, even if one did nothing in it at all and then dropped out part-way through, lest it showed his department in a bad light and possibly jeopardize his campaign to become dean. That same department head also refused to do in-class evaluations because that would be have "policing." (Wasn't that part of his job?)

I seriously thought about getting out of the business altogether when I was threatened with severe disciplinary action by senior department administrators because my students addressed me as Dr. XXXXX. The reason was that it "intimidated" them and they wouldn't, therefore, want to ask me questions lest they believed I might think them dumb. (Uh, maybe because I actually *earned* the degree and the right to use the title? In an educational setting? What did they do when they dealt with a physician or dentist?)

In addition, those same administrators reprimanded me for not allowing students to call me by my first name, in the diminutive or otherwise, rather than Dr. XXXXX or "Sir." Why? Apparently, it didn't create a "safe" learning environment and formality was considered a barrier to learning. I guess the concept of proper and courteous behaviour must have escaped someone. (By the way, I never addressed my students by their first names but as "Mr." and "Sir," or "Ms." and "Madame", whichever was applicable.)

Being a TA wasn't a picnic either.

For example, there was the research associate in the department where I did my Ph. D. She taught an undergraduate engineering course and I graded the student assignments. I was reprimanded one day for pointing out things on their submissions when I marked them even though I didn't always take off marks. Apparently, it upset the little darlings who, presumably, might have given her a bad evaluation. As an experienced practitioner in my profession, I did that as a favour to those students as I thought it might help them later after they got their degrees. Then again, I spent several years in industry and had never seen answers on calculation sheets highlighted in pink, but what did I know, eh?

I was also admonished by the other prof in the aforementioned course for penalizing students for not showing the calculations they did to get their answers because it wasn't a *math* course. Maybe I should have given the marks to the calculators they used as they actually did the work.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. My teaching experiences were the epitome of what Mark Twain said about truth being stranger than fiction. Fiction, he said, has to make sense, after all, and I couldn't make up what I described even if I tried.

I quit teaching at a time and in a matter of my own choosing.

I got tired of having to deal with work-shy dullards and spoiled brats who thought that since they paid their tuition, they deserved to graduate, regardless of whatever rubbish they handed in.

I got fed up with butting heads with administrators who thought that standards of any kind were elitist and that I should put all of my energies into student "success" by passing as many as possible, even if they were lazy and completely lacking in talent.

I didn't want to keep being pressured to sell out and become a corporate academic sheep by lowering the standards required by the discipline I was teaching in.

I couldn't stand working in an environment where the students could do no wrong, every allegation against me was assumed to be true, and I had all the responsibility but no authority.

I wanted to stop going home each day feeling like I had gone through several hours of hand-to-hand combat, questioning at the end what I actually accomplished and what the point of it all was.

I'd had enough of a place that pretended to pay me well, the students pretended that they learned, and I had to pretend that I was actually teaching.

Don't even get me started on all the edu-babble and biz-speak that I had to endure.....

I regret losing a steady paycheck, but each time I recall what I endured as an instructor in order to earn it, I'm glad I'm not doing it any more. Had I stayed where I was, I would probably have left within a year or two on medical grounds, either in need of extensive psychiatric care or because of eventual alcoholism. (I used to make a joke: "Do you have a drinking problem, Mr. XXXXX?" "No." "How soon can you acquire one?")

I resigned several years ago and haven't taught since. It took about two years for all the stress that had built up from my teaching to finally dissipate. Maybe it's good I never became a professor after I finished my Ph. D., after all.

So much for the idea that an educator has a soft job.

The Return of the Academic Haiku. And, Post of the Week At the Same Time. Best Student Excuses Category.

And I'm extremely sorry

that I could not come to class today

because I hada very important meeting with the bank today.

As we know about the worldwide

stock market crisis.

I had to go and give them some specialinstructions.

Sorry for any inconvenience

I caused you.

Ike the Insider Spills It. Some Insight for Job Searchers.

I don't know if you want to use all of this or cut and paste the parts you like, but I'm happy to reply to the naive little booby who sent in his pathetic "thirsty" question yesterday.

There is no way to completely explain how job searches work. They vary tremendously, but as a veteran of about 30 searches at 3 different institutions I can tell you this much:

• Your pedigree matters, but only in that it needs to match our own. Coming from Big Dick Private Research University doesn't do much if we're at the Kansas Barber and Auto Mechanic College. Sure, I guess it seems we should fall over dead at your wonderfulness, but instead we just think you're too damn dumb to find a job at a real school, and you're slumming with us. Same thing works the opposite way, but not as severely. My colleagues in the past have shown a curious excitement about folks from Small Nondescript College because at least we think you won't be as smart as us, and that makes you a good candidate!



• Your letter has to address our ad. Otherwise it gets shuffled off to the side. But the bad news is, most of the job committee doesn't like the wording of the ad anyway. So, the key is to address the ad but NOT to appear too in love with the idea that we want someone who can parse sentences, split atoms, and do HVAC repair. If you buy in too much to the ad, it looks phony, and worse yet, those committee members who don't like the ad will just shuffle you off anyway. Really, the first and only rule of the letter is - do no harm. Don't fuck yourself up. Don't tell us how wonderful you are or how wonderful your students think you are. Be business like. Address our needs, show a little of your stuff, and make sure you reveal something that you know about our job.



• Your vita? Good grief. Nobody reads the vita. We might cruise the dates of your degrees to find out how old/young you are, and then we might compare your publications to ours. Of course if you're in a bunch of journals that we aren't, we aren't going to like you. If you're in publications that we've never heard of, that's bad, too. Just put the fucking thing on white paper, okay?



• Student evaluations are worthless. Nobody would ever send their mediocre ones, so whenever I'm on a committee that asks for them, I just throw up my hands. "Hey, Joe Stumblefuck has a 4.8 in 'grading,' and Jill Dunderknuckle has a 3.6 on 'textbook usage.' Holy shit. Call the Dean's office. We have our man!" If you've got good student evaluations, terrific. They mean nothing.



• Writing samples are a different thing. My field doesn't use them a lot, but I like them. These are clips from published articles or pieces in manuscript. I like seeing both kinds, especially the new stuff. Even though I've generally worked at teaching-intensive colleges, I'm always prone to support someone who's active and working. But don't send clips or samples until asked. When the first-call application comes with 80 sheets of paper, I know you're someone who will tire me and the students out. We don't want you.



• Now on to interviews. Don't be a suck up. Don't be full of yourself. Imagine that you're going to be having lunch with us for the next 5 years, that we'll need a ride from you one day, that your kid will get sick and I'll have to go to the hospital with you. Be natural. Be normal. Most search committees are made up of folks looking for someone who'll be nice and pleasant to have around. Not a sycophant, and not someone eyeing the chair's job. Just a regular person who knows the field, is willing to learn about our college, and willing to pull a load. 95% of all interviewees fuck themselves in the first few minutes by forcing things. Just be normal. You're stopping by our table to say hello and share what you like about teaching. Anything extra special, your very tight trousers, your humongous black framed eye glasses, your European styled bangs...all of that makes us think you're a nutjob. If we finish the interview and I feel like having lunch with you, you're in.
  


• Campus visits. Most of the rules from above reply. Don't be alarmed at our tiny town or the bad streets of our big city. Don't say, like one recent visitor, "Good God there are a lot of strip joints out here by the airport." For God's sake, don't you have an atlas or the Internet. Acting alarmed about the college is not a good thing. Being confused about whether we're in Indiana or Ohio is not good either. And don't overreach either. If you've lived your whole life in Croton-on-Hudson and find yourself in Peanutburg, Mississippi, don't holler out: I CAN TELL I'M GOING TO LOVE IT HERE. I'VE NEVER SEEN SO MANY BOWLING ALLEYS!" Learn about the place BEFORE you come and visit us. One guy came once and said, "Oh that must be your new library. Looks nice." We hired him, and I can tell you it was about 40% of the reason.
  


• Regardless of the hoops that Human Resources and the Dean's Office puts in front of applicants, we're really just looking for someone who'll be a good member of the community. Someone who loves doing the job. Someone who's interested in learning from the rest of us. Someone we want to hang with. Someone who comes off as a regular person, free of insecurity, ego, greed, and pretension. Have you ever spent any time with a group of academics? It's a wonder anyone gets hired at all.
  


• One bit of bad news is that some of your fears are probably real. I've been in search committee discussions where we've openly wondered about applicants' sexual orientation, age, religion, race, etc. It's verboten, we all know it. But it happens and I can't imagine anything that would ever change it. The good news is that it hardly ever makes that much of a difference. Ageism is the thing I see that is abused the most. One nice colleague of mine said, about an applicant, "My God, she must be over 50 years old!" I said, "So?" And then there was quiet.
  


• Hey, Google yourself, okay? I mean, we will. If you don't have a professional page somewhere, either on your own or at your current institution, start one somewhere. If we find that, we'll be happy. If all we can find are pictures of you and your cat on your blog, it's a wasted opportunity. Listen, some of us have cats, okay? But they're not the be-all, end-all of our existence. Same goes for pictures of you with a mojito and a big stain on your pants. Or ANY kind of Facebook page. Grow up, get it? And listen, we have a job open this year at my college. And who do you think is the committee chair? Bring it on.

A Diverse Set of Replies to the Big Thirsty. What the Hell do Search Committess Want? Well, a Lot of Different Things.

The replies we received last night to this week's Big Thirsty were quite diverse. So much so that we confess we've not been able to prepare the answers in a very tidy package. Still, we wanted to share some of what seemed most relevant. Enjoy the flava below:

• I know this isn't the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that sometimes the choice comes down to 3 fully qualified candidates, and from that point on it becomes incredibly subjective. Maybe one candidate seemed easier to get along with; maybe one was just a tad closer to a publication than the others; maybe one had just a shade more teaching experience. Sometimes there are political considerations -- the Chair or Dean didn't like the candidate when the rest of the committee did; there may be pressure to hire a candidate for gender or diversity reasons, etc. Nothing is cut-and-dried or black-and-white when it comes to searches; everything is grey. Trying to choose which candidate is most acceptable often involves innumerable variables that may or may not have anything to do with what we see on the paper or what we thought of your interview(s). In far too many ways -- and in spite of every effort made to keep it from being so -- the truth is that often it is a subjective, unfair process.
  


• I'm always surprised to interview candidates who don't seem to love the work. Many of them spend so much interview time talking about everything else. Are there nice parks in your town? My spouse teaches Developmental Ed. Is there room for her? What's it like living so close to the mountains? Etc. That's all important, but unless a candidate shows me that he/she loves teaching and is consumed by being good at it, I'm not interested.



• There's always the possibility that while your cv is good enough, your personality is so appalling that no one wants to sign on to work with you for the next 30 years. If you're interviewing at places where people are hiring from "Podunk U," it's likely that some of them went to "Podunk U" and don't really consider that a major failing. If your attitude in interviews matches your attitude in your post, I'm betting that's part of the problem.
  


• I always watch out for red flags, job hopping too much, a short stay at what seems like a good place to work. I look poorly on job letters that feel canned, that aren't very specific to our particular position. If you're lazy in your job search, just imagine how lazy you'll be doing the job!
  


• Apply for the job only if you clearly meet the qualifications. If the ad says "degree in X" or "Y years of experience," we really meant that. Those preferred qualifications are important too. If you don't have any of them, you're not going to be preferred. Write a cover letter that doesn't suck out loud. We got letters that were clearly recycled from position to position to the point even of not bothering to change the name of the recipient. If you want a decent shot, make sure your letter is specific to the job you are applying for. Don't regurgitate your CV; actually put some effort into writing something that shows us you read the job ad and explains why we should hire you with some specifics. Grammar and mechanics do matter. We're asking you to educate our students, so at least demonstrate you're reasonably educated in basic literacy. Research our college prior to the interview. We have a web site and employer profiles available. Find out about us so we know you are actually interested in us, not just any job. Show you have an idea about what type of school you've applied to. Higher ed positions are not interchangeable. Podunk U and Inner City Community College are not the last refuge of the desperate. We have talented faculty who actually want to be here and work with the kinds of students we serve. Condescension and cluelessness are a deadly combination at the campus interview. Realize that even if you do all of that, you still may not get the job, and it may not be about you. A lot of times, several great candidates submit materials and then nail the interview. Then it comes down to personal preferences of the committee members. Different people give emphasis to different criteria, so that may be where it comes down. It may be that the committee loved you and you were their first choice, but the second interview with administrators was the deciding factor. Or political factors may be at work. Administration may have deemed that this is the year we hire more people who meet X qualification (sub-specialty, diversity, geographic location), and you don't.
  


• This may sound stupid, but don't act as if you're better than the rest of us. It's the number one automatic "pass" that I've seen.



• Hiring on "merits" is not as easy as it sounds. Certainly on the first go-around we look at basic qualifications: degree (and prestigious degrees are not always that important), field, publications, teaching experience. After that it honestly gets much more personal, because you need to match candidates to the people and situations that already exist in the department. I have one colleague who always wants to hire the ivy league clone of himself; another that always wants an everyman to balance out Mr. Ivy. If you already have a bunch of very shy people in the dept, you may be drawn the outgoing candidate, or you might want Junior Me, the shy one. I've seen people really warm to a candidate because of non-qualifications: he plays the violin, she is a long-distance runner. There are also serious considerations. Will this candidate appeal to the students at OUR university? We have passed over Ivy leaguers because they couldn't relate to the students, not us. We also ask ourselves whether the person is likely to stay once we hire them. If we keep hiring people who use the job to build their resume and then take off for greener pastures, the Dean will get pissed. So it may appear that we are hiring a lesser candidate from the outside when we know that our own needs are better met.
  


• Do your search professionally. Spend more time on it than you think you have to because it trumps anything else you're doing. You can't believe the sloppy applications that come in. A full half of each set of applications are discarded because of ridiculous oversights - wrong committee chair name, wrong institution name, gross misspellings, not including requested material, and the list goes on. Also, don't apply for a job that requires you to do something you: a) have never done; b) have not been trained to do; or c) don't want to do - and you even say so!



• Before you set foot on campus, research the school, the department, the courses, enrollment trends, the students, the mission statement and more. It will show you are interested in the job. You should be able to hold a conversation about the campus with enough interest to convince us you might actually be interested. We will ask why you want to teach here and it better not be because the salary is adequate. Read the advertisement carefully realizing what you are being hired to teach is different from what you want to teach. Have a nice firm hand shake and look us in the eye. Listen. Talk nicely to the secretary, the support staff and students. Sucking up to the committee does no good if we see disdain for students or the janitors. What are you bringing to the campus? What will you add? Be sure to let them know your skills and accomplishments. For one position, there were two equally qualified candidates. We gave it to the person who seemed to be the most enthusiastic and actually stated she wanted the job. Turns out, we made the right choice again.
  


• I see a big red flag right there in your description if you’re applying to teaching-oriented jobs. You have research experience. And apparently a lot of it. Which screams to many hiring committees trying to fill teaching-focused positions “this person is going to want to do research more than teach.” Which in turn means “this person will be dissatisfied teaching and will move to a research-oriented job as soon as s/he can.” So unless you’re applying to do research, you should lay off that part of your vita. Make sure your reference letters discuss your teaching skills and personality, and not your research ability. Avoid even talking about research unless someone specifically asks you.



• One possibility you might not have considered is that the search committee looks at your background and concludes (wrongly) that you would either a.) not seriously consider taking a position at their school and are merely fishing around, or b.) would take a position, then bolt when a better opportunity presented itself. Searches are hard, expensive work, and folks on those committees would rather not go through the trouble of making an offer that won’t be accepted or hiring someone only to have another search in a year. They may be making their decision based on the likelihood of success (where success = someone accepting the position and staying awhile). Perhaps you could take a look at what you might be doing during the interview process that would give off a “not really serious about this school” vibe. For example...”Podunk U.” and the assumptions that go along with it...

"What the Hell Are They Looking For?" Another Job Related Big Thirsty.

I'm in my third year of a seemingly endless job search. I have a nice dossier with strong recommendations, good student evaluations, writing samples, transcripts, etc.

I went to a top 50 undegrad institution, and got my PhD from a top 20 (or so) school in my discipline. I've been told that I interview well, I don't drool, I don't come off as a nutjob, but I keep missing out on jobs even after 1-2 interviews. I google the folks who get the jobs in place of me and find nothing that suggests these folks are head and shoulders above me. Some have no publications at all - where I have a handful of my own and a dozen co-authored. Some went to - forgive me - Podunk U. and have no teaching experience save for their grad school service.

I don't expect anyone reading this to know what's "wrong" with me, but I'd love to hear some real and unfiltered responses to: "What the hell are job committees REALLY looking for?" I've read the bullshit over at the Chronicle, and that seems awfully dull and PC. Can we tell the truth about this here, like we do about our silly snowflake students?

Q: So, when you serve on a search committee, what attracts you in a vita and letter? What are you looking for from a conference interview? What do you need to witness in a campus interview to sway you someone's way? Tell the truth, okay? Time is running out.

A: Send your replies here.

Cleo Makes Us Feel Better About Our Own Students. So, While We Feel Badly for Chemistry Kirk (Who's from Canton), We Post This and Send Our Hugs.

Clueless Cleo skated by on a “Two strikes, you’re out” policy whereby I was forced to let her first cheating offense go at an exam grade of zero, but was not allowed to fail her or drop her from the course.

Through personal interaction, it was clear she understood nothing. Her assignments, however, were reasonably well done. I strongly suspected that she was cheating, but had no way to prove it. I showed a paper she wrote to the department chair and then described the way she communicates in class. That, however, did not constitute sufficient proof for that “second strike.”

My superior told me I’d need a sample of the woman’s normal communication skills to submit to the dean for comparison. I teach chemistry, so aside from the one paper, which I had already collected, there was nothing else on the syllabus that would justify having her write something for me with witnesses. I had to give her a C- for the term, even though I would have bet my right arm that she was having someone else do her assignments.

The day after grades were submitted, she sent me this:

--

dear professor:

how are you? i am cleo who was your student in your chemistry class in morroning (8:30--10:20)

i send this massage to you because i want highter GPA to supppor my major that was education. the education major needs better GPA to suppor . can you give me better GPA to suppor my major????????/

from: cleo

Tony from Tuscaloosa Gets Tripped Up by Typhoid Troy on Eval Day.

I had my peer teaching evaluation today and I know I fucked it up! All because of one student, Typhoid Troy, who came to class as sick as you can be without dying. I’m standing there trying to get through my lesson plan, trying to show what a brilliant teacher I am, and Troy is sitting in the back (right next to my evaluator, I may add) judiciously coughing up a lung. This keeps going on and on, his bowel-shaking wracking cough providing a counterpoint to my most amazing ethical analysis. On and on and on.

Now, instead of worrying about content I’m thinking “Should I kick him out?”

C’mon Troy, do you really need me to be your mommy? Just get up and leave – go die somewhere else. I should kick him out, but I’m worried. What if my evaluator feels that this poor, precious snowflake so loves this subject that he strives to attend class even when at death’s door? What if I’d be seen as completely crushing his little, snowflakey ego?

The coughing continues. I continue. I don’t do anything. Then, when I’m packing up after class, the evaluator approaches me and says:

“I’d have kicked him out.”

Wherein We Teach Whatever is Needed.

So it’s Philosophy 101 as usual. I and my adult weekend students have just started on Existentialism.

So, there I am explaining “existence precedes essence” and “you are what you do” and “life is about the choices you make” and “You are responsible for your destiny” etc, etc. Doing my part for the strategic plan… critical thinking and all that. All of a sudden I see a hand. How exciting! Let the discussion BEGIN!

“Yes” I say.

“Can you explain the $700 billion bailout? I don’t understand that at all.”

Needless to say, my first thought was, “I’m sorry; you’ve obviously mistaken this class for ECON 101.” WTF??? This is Philosophy. Why the hell are you asking me this? I’m not a financial expert. I have a tight schedule and we need to stick to it. This is not on today’s agenda.

But then I look around the room; and I see fear. I have a room full of adult students who don’t give a rat’s ass about Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche. They want to know what the fuck is going on with the economy. And I hear follow-up questions from other students “Yeah, if we are responsible for what we do, then why do we have to bailout Wall Street?” “What about my retirement? I’ve been responsible.” “What’s happening to America?”

And I realize that I’m going to lose time today. Because I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.

So, thankfully, I have what I’ve read online at CNN, MSNBC, and BBC World as my guide, and we have a 45 minute discussion about what’s going on. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject – I flat out tell them that I am not. But we do discuss it. We discussed the mortgage situation and delineated the difference between the unfortunate and the stupid; and debated on whether either/both should be helped. I used the potential California bankruptcy as an illustration of the need for the bailout. Students laugh when I refered to the situation as “Schwarzenegger asking for the $7 billion ‘payday loan’ that they take out every year.” We can all relate to that!

I did manage to insert a little of the day’s assignment (the present economy actually goes quite well with Nietzsche – this is what happens when the Master Morality goes too far!) But more importantly, I gave the students an opportunity to vent and express their fears. They didn't get expert advice, but hopefully, they felt a little better afterwards.

It was not the discussion I planned. However, it was the discussion I had to do.

I can’t pretend it wasn’t scary. When the question was asked, I felt like a deer in the headlights. To have 17 students looking to me as ”The Expert,” (to which I add “in Philosophy, not the economy”) for guidance about something I'm not sure I understand myself is a tad bit terrifying. However, I think I did a decent job on the discussion.

I always expect the application of my lessons to be guided by current events. My syllabus hasn’t changed much over the years, but the discussion topics change every semester. Had this question come up during Political Philosophy (Chapter 11), I might have been more ready. But it came up during Continental Philosophy (Chapter 8.) I wanted to discuss the meaning of life – but instead, I ended up discussing economy.

I don’t know how we’ll make up the 45 minutes, I’ll probably have to cut something out. But in the end, if the discussion made my students feel better, it was worth it.

"In Heaven, An Angel is Nobody in Particular." (Thanks to GBS.)

I totally support your requirement that your students staple their work. I want mine stapled, too. However, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself to you. Hi. I’m the one whose office is down at the end of the hall, just outside your classroom. You may have noticed that I keep my door open when I’m in my office – otherwise it feels like a coffin. Maybe you haven’t noticed me at all. But your students sure have. I’m the one who gives them all those staples on the days their homework is due.

Incidentally, to these lovely students: I am NOT an office supply store, or a secretary. You obviously printed that paper here on campus, maybe in the computer lab or the writing lab. But I’m just as sure as can be that someplace else on this campus – perhaps said computer lab or writing lab, has staplers. Look around near the printers. But please stop coming to me. I’m very busy!

I’ve come to love these dear staple-less students. I don’t even get annoyed with them anymore. But Just in case you’re not sure, I can assure you that every time your students come to class with their homework neatly stapled, at least three of them have walked in to my office and asked to staple their papers. And every single time, I have let them.

800 Tons of Waste, and That Doesn't Even Include the Cafeterias. JobFinder Rolls On.

Yale University

Environmental Affairs Manager

Yale University is looking for an Environmental Affairs Manager. Join our dynamic Office of Environmental Health and Safety at one of the world's premier universities, which is undergoing transformative growth. Yale provides generous benefits and strongly supports OEHS. New Haven has outstanding dining, theater and other culture, and is close to all the attractions of New England and New York City. Fall is beautiful.

The Environmental Affairs Manager has broad responsibilities for Yale University's environmental compliance. This position leads the Yale EHS Environmental Affairs Section, including permitting, reporting, recordkeeping and hazardous waste management. The position directly supervises four employees, including an environmental operations manager who supervises eight employees. Yale has over 50 environmental permits, licenses and registrations, and annually manages over 800 tons of radioactive, biomedical, universal and other hazardous waste.

Salary range is $80,000 to $110,000+. Applications must be submitted on line via www.yale.edu/jobs (Refer to STARS Req ID 5556BR).

For more information and the full position description, please contact Peter A. Reinhardt, Director, Office of Environmental Health & Safety, Yale University, (203) 737-2123, peter.reinhardt@yale.edu.

Where RYS Finds Its New Hero: Stapler Nutjob Nancy!

• Life is worth living again, because at least I don't have students like Jeremy. The Stapler Lady has taken a stand, and - while it's not mine - I respect her for it.



• I hope you stapled the little bastard's ass to the wall. Laughing and running away? It's YOUR problem? That's 15% of his grade blowing in the wind and YOU'RE supposed to pick it up? Geez, that looks like a big fat zero to me.



• If you had taken Jeremy's stack of papers and realized upon, beginning to grade them, that they were in fact filled with homework for another class, or did not meet the terms of the assignment, or whatever, you would not be required to give him credit just because he handed you the papers and you accepted them. If your syllabus and policies state that work must be stapled, then he has not met the terms of the assignment, and you can assess any penalty that your policy allows. It's up to you how far you want to try and push that--if he decides to go to the dean, you're going to end up having to back down--but you needn't feel the list bit of compunction if a couple of pages got lost in that breeze. If they'd been stapled, they'd have been safe; since they weren't, it's only his word that they were there in the first place.



• I don't know what this says about me as a human being but I live for moments like the one that the Stapler Nazi had with young Jeremy. Here's my advice to her. Pick up as many of the papers as you reasonably can and return them in the next class period, unmarked and unrecorded. When the little darling boy protests, remind him that you never actually said you were accepting them and even questioned him about the stapling. That kid should know that shoving things in a professor's hands and running away is a little different than turning things in. If he wanted special treatment, he probably should have started by helping you pick up his papers. Then, optionally, call him a "a little fucker," just for emphasis (Warning: perform this step only if you have tenure).



• ...and of course your only rejoinder to his idiocy is to yell across the quad "Print me a new copy, MoFo, and have it in my hand, STAPLED, within X hours [you make that call; my work here is done.]!



• Stapler Nazi Nancy better have just let lame-ass Jeremy's papers fly on the breeze! The little punk handed in papers, was asked to staple them as per the syllabus, refused, then watched them flutter off in the autumn breeze. He even had the audacity to smirk and run off and claim he handed them in?!?!?!? No, punk, you didn't. F! F! F! Zeroes on everything! Let him moan. Let him wail. Let him file a complaint! Let him tell someone that he ran off after his papers flew on the breeze because he refused to take them back when he didn't get them stapled after trying to hand them in late...outside...on a breezy day. That's an F worth getting fired for. Guess what Jeremy's unaware of: He has to prove he did the work. He also has to prove he handed it in. It's not Stapler Nazi Nancy's problem that the papers got lost. That's what the fucking staple was supposed to prevent! Oh, and a big heaping pile of zero for "participation" too. Fail the fucker.
  
  
• Like the Stapler Lady, I have given up on so much in my classes. I'm so tired of the fight over the tiniest things - like the stapling! But this post has given me courage. Baby steps, of course. But I'm going to tell them that I'm through with them coming in wearing slippers from now on. It's not pedagogically significant, perhaps, but let them at least start treating my classroom as something other than an extension of their dorm room. That's a start. Staples next semester. Doing their own work in 2011. What a renaissance I'm heralding.

Some Links.

• 2nd drinking death at Wabash College. From IndyStar.com.


• Argument leads to fatal stabbing at San Diego State. From SignOnSanDiego.com.


• Colorado prof threatened by burning office door and delivery of swastika. From Rocky Mountain News.


• Prof arrested with hundreds of guns, some stolen. From WBZTV.com.


• The David Foster Wallace Memorial. From the LA Times.


• Why college cheating matters. From Knowledge @ W.P. Carey.


• The economy's effect on student loans. From the Seattle Times.


• The 2008 Ig Nobels. From ArsTechnica.com.


• Advice for new department chairs. From Chronicle.com.


• Electronic textbooks in a major pilot program in Texas. From InsideHigherEd.com.

Wait a Minute. We Have to Get Up, Get CLEAN, AND Go To Class?

We have to ask our dear little hearts to do so much work out of class that I feel dreadful asking them to do more, but, would it be too much to ask for attention to a little personal hygiene before coming to school?

While I realize that "showering" or otherwise rinsing the bed funk off before 8 a.m. is way too much to ask, is brushing one's teeth too much? Really, is it too much to ask that our students do not come to class breathing their morning dragon-breath on us? Could it be too much to request of the poor souls to slap on some deodorant or at least run a wet wipe over the stinky parts and chew a stick of gum before running up to my desk prior to class to ask me if, really and truly, I am requiring them to use APA citations when Dr. Y asks for MLA?

I work in a subtropical environment and I am often rushing into class, "glowing" as ladies might when they've run up 13 flights of stairs because the broken little 18-year-olds are crammed 30 deep in the elevators and none could possibly move for a prof with arms full of books and papers.

So, I know I'm sweaty when I get to class, but owing to my attention to the little details like showering (with soap!), brushing my teeth, using deodorant, and wearing clothes that have seen the inside of the washing machine since August 1, I'm unlikely to gas my students with my aroma. Is it too much to ask they don't do the same for me?

The Stapler.

I have about given up on everything in my classes. I can't stop them from talking or turning in shit late, or being in class on time. I cajole and threaten, I take points off, nothing works. They don't care. They flunk and they sign up again next semester. They stop coming and they become someone else's problems.

It makes me crazy.

But I do have one rule. I don't know how it came about, but of all the stuff in my syllabus there's one thing I hold on to. Homework, assignments, and essays must be stapled.

It's bold faced. I'm not even joking. I mention it in class. I talk about it before each thing comes in. I make a joke out of it, so they don't think I've gone completely out of my gourd. I bring staplers to class sometimes. I give them away sometimes. I buy the cheapo minis at our campus store and pass them out. I pick up old ones that the library is going to toss, clean them, oil them, fill them, and pass them out.

I don't even care if my students call me the Stapler Nazi. I figure it's good to be known as something other than just some faceless teaching drone.

So, staplers, you get it? I'm adamant about stapling the work that comes in. And I won't bore you, but seriously, papers get mixed up, they slide around in a big briefcase. Stuff gets lost, mixed in. It slows down my grading. It takes longer to get work back. There's the endless bullshit of, "well maybe you lost it."

My students turn in something almost every day, even if it's just +/- stuff for homework. Staple it, I say. I won't even take it if it's not stapled. That's the RULE. I've given up almost everywhere else. I've let the heathens in through every opening otherwise, but not on this. The world's gone mad, the economy is in shambles, overpopulation, drought, mad cow, Lyme disease, whatever. But you turn in something to me, and it has to be stapled.

So, Jeremy, sweet Jeremy, who's been in my class for 6 weeks now, hands me 20 sheets of rough drafts, notes, graphs, worksheets, etc. as I'm leaving class. I'm late. He's missed most of class because he was getting his stuff together. He catches me at the classroom door and follows along with his excuses while I go down the stairs.

He pulls out the unruly sheaf of papers at the front door. He proffers them. I can see they're fluttering in the breeze, no staple, no nothing. 20 loose sheets of paper that account for about 15% of his grade for the term.

"Stapled?" I say, gulping.

"Uh, couldn't find one," he says, and then he plops them in my hand.

He starts down the stairs, and I stare at the stack of papers. A boy coming up bumps me, and just then a breeze swoops across. Jeremy's papers go everywhere. Fluttering. It's October leaves. They fly and spin and shoot across my field of vision.

Then I see Jeremy at the bottom of the stairs. His mouth is open. He's starting to laugh. "I turned them IN," he says. "You took them. It's your problem NOW..." And he starts into a jog, away from me, across the quad, while his papers still fly free.

Two Years Ago Today: Take a Spin in the Flashback Machine.

A statistics prof at a large state school sends along this helpful FAQ.

Q: My TA can't speak English.
A: Before graduate students become TAs, they are required to pass a spoken English test. If they fail this test, they don't become TAs. So apparently somebody thinks your TA can speak English. I did not hire your TA, choose them from a pool of candidates, nor do I have the power to fire them. So you're wasting your time by bitching to me.

Q: Is there any way I can get a C in your course?
A: Sure, just get 70% of the possible points. I thought I made that clear on the first day of class.

Q: I need this class to graduate.
A: Guess what - every single person enrolled in this course needs it to graduate. Did you think your classmates were taking it as an elective? Needing this course to graduate does not make you a special case, so don't expect special consideration or treatment.

Q: I need this class to get into my major.
A: See previous answer.

Q: I work 40 hours a week.
A: See previous answer.

Q: My TA is an asshole.
A: I hope you don't think you're the first college student to have an asshole for a teacher. It happens to many students every semester at basically every university on the planet. Face it, there are a lot of assholes out there. Do you want to know what I did when I had an asshole for a TA? I studied hard, then I walked away laughing at the end of the semester because I got an A, despite my asshole teacher. I got a lot more satisfaction from that than from whining.

Q: Could you tell me my TA's name, office hours, phone number, etc.?
A: I do not know your TA's office hours or phone number off the top of my head. I am not a secretary. On the first day of recitation, your TA told you these things and if you didn't write them down that's your problem. Here's an idea - go to recitation, and ask yourself.

Q: Everything seems easy when you do it on the board in class, but when it comes to the exam, I don't do that well.
A: You know why it looks easy when I do it? Because I'm good at it. I've been doing these problems for years. If you want to become good at them, study your lecture notes and do the practice problems in the book.

Q: I never miss class, study like crazy, get extra help, I do everything you tell me to do, but I'm still failing. What am I doing wrong?
A: How the hell should I know? Maybe you're not paying attention in class, not studying correctly, or getting help from the wrong people. It's also possible that you're just not that bright.

Q: I'm done with this homework problem, but can you just tell me if I did it right?
A: You'll find out when you get it back after it is graded. What's important right now is whether or not you think it's right. If you think it's right, leave it. If not, change it.

Q: I do well on the homework and quizzes, but fail the exams. I guess I'm just a bad test taker. Will this affect my grade?
A: Well obviously it will. Why do you assume you're a bad test taker? Maybe you're just good at taking quizzes or copying your friend's homework, and your exam scores reflect that you aren't learning as much as you thought.

Q: I didn't have enough time to finish the exam.
A: Tough. If I wanted to, I could put 1000 problems on the exam, just to see how many you could do in 50 minutes. As the instructor, I have the right to write as many problems as I want.

Q: I had no idea homework was due today.
A: Baloney. I make announcements in class constantly about when your next homework is due, and it's on your syllabus.

Q: The real exam wasn't like the practice exam.
A: I don't remember promising you it would be. I hand out a practice exam because I think it might help you prepare for the real one. If you feel it didn't help you, then don't take a practice exam next time.

Q: Your class is full. Can I get in?
A: What do you think "full" means?

Q: Sorry I haven't been to class lately, but I'm not a morning person.
A: So why are you signing up for classes that meet in the morning?

Q: I think I'm about to fail this class. Is there anything I can do?
A: Yes. Take the class again.

Sara from Saskatoon Seuss-ifies the Academic Haiku. It'll Never Be the Same.

I do not like them, Sam I am.
I do not like my 8 a.m.
I want to hit them with a bar
I’d like to throw them ‘neath a car.
I’d like to feed them to a goat
I’d like to throw them in a moat
I do not like them, Sam I am.
I do not like my 8 a.m.

I’m sick of stony silent faces
While I put them through their paces
They do not read; they do not care
It’s like talking to the air.
They turn in papers in pink ink
And their spelling mostly stinks.
There’s a computer at every seat—
They could turn in papers nice and neat
They could even print them in the room
And save themselves from grading doom.
But do they do this, Sam I am?
No, not them, my 8 a.m.

I do not like them, Sam I am.
I do not like my 8 a.m.
Their homework, they never do
I swear, they haven’t got a clue.
Yes, Sam, reminded them I have
More than once, might I add.
Major assignments, what are those?
They just sit there and pick their nose.
They’ll have to take the class again—
The only thing that keeps me sane
Is next semester I will be
Here at home with my baby.
The stupid sniveling dumbass brats
Will be in someone else’s class.
I do not like them, Sam I am.
I do not like my 8 a.m.

I do not think that they believe
In the big fat F’s that they’ll receive.
After all, they show up each day
And books and tuition they did pay.
I wonder if they’ll gasp in shock
When the axe hits the chopping block
And their failing grades they see
Sent to them, with love, from me.
I do not like them, Sam I am.
I do not like my 8 a.m.

We Don't Like the Notion of a Festering Ayhole, But It's Right In the First Paragraph. Most Hated Student Series Continues. (We Weep for JobFinder.)

Ayhole Arnold--that's the name I have given my most hated student. He's been out of my life for a few years, but he still festers a bit.

Ayhole added my course and everything seemed fine for a while, except for his habit of showing up at least half an hour late for class. Fast forward a couple of months: I started giving out print-outs of everyone's grades, points, and status for the semester thus far. Ayhole was shocked to see that he had been losing points for tardiness. He claimed he had never gotten a syllabus and didn't know my policies. (How he had kept up with things up to that point is a mystery; perhaps he was looking at a classmate's syllabus, which defeated the whole premise of his outrage.) He also claimed that he had a legal right to be late because he had religious duties to attend to that kept him from getting to this Friday class on time. I told him there was no such rule and that he had to prove there was. He stormed out of the room in a huge huff.

I told him that he could have called or emailed me for a syllabus, or reminded me to bring one, or to copy one from a student. None of this penetrated. He tried to harangue me after class was over for that Friday afternoon and no one else was around. I made sure to gather up my things and get out of the room as fast as I could to shorten my dealings with him. (I confess that this is where I made a mistake; I should have reported his ayhole-ishness sooner than I did.)

I found out a short time later that he had gone to my then-department-head to complain about me. She told him he had no case, and he harangued her for almost an hour anyway. When I heard about this from her, I wrote him up for persistent defiance/abuse/however they phrase it and sent this write-up to a useless fellow in charge of student discipline. His response was to leave a voicemail in which he pretty much blew it all off as no big deal, and then had the nerve to ask me if I would meet with him and the student to clarify things. I left him a voicemail reply telling him that I didn't understand how he could take plagiarism seriously but not the repeated harassment of a professor.

Then I got a division dean involved--a fellow I'd known since grad school--and he "clarified" things very well to the useless fellow mentioned in the previous paragraph. By extension, Ayhole received a bit of clarification as well. The division dean also told me to call his cell if Ayhole tried any more nonsense with me so he could run down and deal with the jerk directly. I also learned that he had pulled this sort of crap in the past with other proffies.

Finally things worked out in my favor. Ayhole settled down once I'd gotten a bigger kid into the sandbox. But the feelings still linger. It makes me bitter that he'd done things like this before and hadn't been smacked down for it, and that the useless fellow couldn't be bothered to deal with a student bullying a professor in an otherwise empty room.

Missy from Montauk Celebrates Our Brilliance, and then Pays Tribute to the Dunce-itude of Her Young Charges.

God, I love RYS. It is a shining beacon of hope akin to that which I usually find at the bottom of my vodka/tonic-filled glass. Okay, so I’m not an English Professor – cut me some slack. All of this is beside the point – I’m here to RANT!

So, why are the students at my (almost) top 50 nationally ranked college such dumb shits? They come from an area which (supposedly) has one of the best public school systems in the nation. But it seems like they are not even capable of wiping their own asses without being told how to do it.

Asshole Category
Runner: At this point I am willing to sacrifice my ever so precious success on my evaluations and your malignment of me on the website that shall not be named just to make the rest of your semester an absolute living hell. You emailed the professor of the class (I’m but the lowly TA that has to deal with you) and told the professor that his class was boring! And you gave him what I assume were incredibly insightful suggestions to improve his class. Like, don’t answer questions from anyone, because everyone’s questions are dumb and are a waste of time (not his exact words, but you get the point). Then, you have the nerve to come up to me after class, and proceed to quibble with me on almost every single point of your exam. You even tried to get points back for an incorrect MULTIPE CHOICE QUESTION. Balls. You said, “Well, according to my interpretation of the question, this was the correct answer.” And I said, “Well, your interpretation of the question is incorrect, and your answer is (still) incorrect as well.” Then I ask, “How many of the short answer questions do you want to discuss with me?” I knew I was in trouble when he smugly spat back at me, “ALL of them.” He continued to condescendingly glare at me for the next 20 minutes while I explained to him where and why I took off points for each question. He wouldn’t let up and kept repeating the same question about why he had points taken off all of those word vomit salads of his. It got to the point where it was obvious that his strategy was just to harass me for so long that I would eventually cave in and give him extra points to make him go the fuck away. But FUCK THAT. I will not put up with the bullshit sentiment from a freshman nose picker that I can be BULLIED into giving higher grades because you are a man and I happen to be a woman. And yes, please go talk to the actual professor to “discuss” your grades. He has my back and is going to tear your arrogant little ass a new one. Especially after you have emailed him to tell him that his lecture is boring.

Dumb Category
C for Clueless: Good Lord. Really? Really? You are really volunteering this information to me? You come up to me and tell me that you have not been in class for the last MONTH because you were going to the wrong room and sitting in on a criminology class. How the FLYING FUCK did you not realize for a month that you were not in the philosophy class that you had signed for? God. EITHER you are plumbing the horrifically deep depths of dumb, OR you think that I’m a complete moron who will not see through your ridiculous lie. ALTHOUGH, at least you are not worse than the student I had who told me that he did not come to class (at all) for the first 3 weeks of the semester because he couldn’t find the classroom. Lucky for him, I took him at his word because he was, after all, a computer science major.

Redemption (groan) Category
Felicia: After the complete verbal abuse I enjoyed thanks to one of your classmates, the way you approached me was respectful and your attitude did not seem to need any adjusting. You are the type of girl who got alllllllllllll A’s in high school and now that you are in college and completely BOMBED your first test, you are shocked and destroyed. I could tell this by the complete and utter (uncharacteristic) silence from you for the rest of the class after the tests were handed back. You came up to me after class and what did you do? Well, you asked me if I had time to talk to you about your test. I said yes, and we went to my office. You then told me, “I sucked, and I want to get better.” No scrounging for extra points, no complaining that I graded unfairly, no sucking up to me by telling me how interesting and important the class is to you. You just straight up wanted to know what to do to get a better grade. And so I told you. And hopefully you will get higher than a 45% on the next test.

"Which Student Do I Hate Most? Which Day Is It?" Monte from Montgomery Meanders Through Myriad Malfunctionaries.

Today was Monday of the sixth week of classes. I had a student come to me who still didn't know that our class has a lab. What did he think when I'd announced each upcoming lab on Friday, and again on Monday, every week for the past five weeks? Of course, it's possible that today was the first time he'd attended a class. I couldn't help noticing that he had real trouble speaking in coherent sentences. It was all I could do to keep from saying, "I'm sorry, but I can't help you, because you're too stupid for anything that I can say to do any good."

Dante would no doubt say that students who lie are the worst, since lying is the accomplice to all other crimes. What's troubling is how MANY ways modern undergraduates can find to lie. The recent discussion of how a little compassion is a reasonable response might have been appropriate if it concerned mature adults, but undergraduates who lie about dead grandparents outnumber honest students by at least 10 to 1. What's especially distressing is how EASY they find it to lie, and how OBVIOUS their lies are. It's therefore easy to pick out the students with real dead grandparents and to refrain from requesting the usual documentation from them: students with real dead grandparents show signs of emotional disturbance.

Grossly immature students are bad, too. I lose all respect for any sniveling little twerp who tries to tattle on me, particularly if it's over something specifically mentioned in the syllabus, such as how I don't accept late homework or how I don't give make-up exams.

Students who try to do me harm are also bad, but now that I have tenure and am respected both as a teacher and as a researcher, there's not much they can do that can actually hurt me, short of a physical assault. Posting to that site-that-will-not-be-named doesn't hurt, because it doesn't have any more validity (or literacy) than what's written in the bathroom stalls. Also, as I get older, my hide gets thicker.

Being physically assaulted by students is no fun. Once when I was riding my bicycle home at night, some college boys drove up in two pickup trucks, and gleefully threw paper cups containing ice at the back of my head. They hit me both times, but it wasn't enough to knock me off my bike. I sure wish I'd been able to get their license plate numbers: it's good that I don't carry a gun, because I'd have used it. I seem to remember two of them from my big general-ed class, but with over 100 students per class, I couldn't pick them out in a police line-up. Physical assaults are (still) rare, though: lesser crimes, such as stupidity, lying, and immaturity can disturb me more, because a sustained assault of them can wear me down.

I hate to have to say this, but the students I hate the absolute most as a group are Liberal Studies majors. These are undergraduates in the education school, studying (ostensibly) to be K-12 teachers. I've never seen students less interested in learning---and indeed, more positively hostile toward it!---largely because of their inability to do so, and because of their insecurity and denial about it. Dealing with these people (I can hardly call it teaching them) is especially painful for me because my father was a high-school teacher, and he was a smart fellow. Thank goodness he didn't live to see what education has come to, although he did get a taste of it, when he didn't cope well with the Sixties. It's well documented that these ed-school wonders have the lowest SAT scores of any undergraduates, and that they graduate to the lowest-paying jobs. Worse, they're organized, and when they complain en masse to the ed school, it caves in to their every demand, no matter how ridiculous. These are the people with whom we trust our children. God help the good old U. S. of A.: if I ever have kids, they are going to private school!

Our Newest Chief Correspondent, Bernice from Buffalo Blasts Away at Bleary, that Befuddled and Blurry Bastard. BOOM!

Wow, sleepy, bleary-eyed, distant kid in the back corner, you really woke yourself up today, didn't you? In the middle of our reading discussion you called me over to your table, even. Why? To ask me an insightful question about the reading? To point out a passage you found particularly interesting? No. To inform me that you weren't there when I passed the reading out.

Of course, I knew this. I knew this especially since you had emailed me the night before (four days after your missed class, I might add) to ask "if there was an assignment." Being the overly committed and doting instructor that I am, who all too often gives students like you, Bleary, the benefit of the doubt, I emailed you back within the half hour, describing the assignment and giving you a link to where you could find the reading online. I am awesome! I used Google for you!! I knew you would be grateful.

But today, you informed me that you wanted to hand your response in later in the afternoon and have it count as on time. "No," I said. You were stupefied, even angered, which, I have to say, impressed me a little, since I had my doubts that you were even able to move out of your half-comatose, drooling stupor. "Well how am I supposed to get the assignment when I'm not here?"

Great question, Blearster! Now, if you had been this awake on day one of this course, you would probably remember that 1) You're not supposed to be absent, especially with no forewarning, planning, or heads up to me, and 2) If you ARE absent YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN LAZY ASS!! It's not worded exactly this way, but I guarantee you, if you can dig up that "syllabus" thingy, it's in there.

What kills me, Blears--can I call you Blears?--is that I broke my own damn rule for you. I gave you a link. I told you the assignment. And all within a half hour. And when I asked you about this in class you said "Last night? Oh, I didn't check my email after I sent that to you." Now why would that be? Why would you ever send a question regarding tomorrow's class and then not look for an answer? Could it be that you actually could care have cared less what the assignment was, and you were just trying to placate your instructor to buy yourself some time?

Well, Blearster, you lose. You not only will not get credit for this assignment, but your name is in my book, and that means when the participation fairy comes and hands out points to all the good boys and girls, you're not going to be on the list. Sad, sad Blearster. Oh, and I graded your paper last night too. Believe me, you really needed those points.

Where Our Readers Take Up Anatomy Boy's Cause And Offer Some Guidance.

• If your professor suggested $300+ of "highly recommended" study materials, he ought to have put copies of them on reserve in the university library. If he didn't, ask him to. You won't be the only person who couldn't afford them. His looks, his adoring female disciples, and his open-season office hours are irrelevant to your concerns. I'll give you a hint: showing up in office hours actually won't make that much of a difference. He only said that because it's generally good students who show up in office hours. It's knowing the material that will actually make a difference. Give yourself time to learn it properly. Your problem is your full-time work schedule. You can't carry both the work load and this time-intensive course. You're going to have to drop one or renegotiate the other.



• For some reason I think that there is another side to the paranoid anatomy student’s story. I can’t imagine any professor encouraging a student to come to their office hours “because he needs that gaggle of (mostly female) students to follow him around,” especially when he has a class of over 600 students. Give me a fucking break. I teach anatomy & physiology and the majority of my students don’t pass the exams (or the class). Is it because I make the tests too hard? They’d probably say yes to that, but I’m sorry, most of my students are headed off to some health care profession and I’d like it if they knew the difference between the liver and the stomach. A&P is hard, and it usually requires way more than “30-60 minutes per day” to study for the class. I offer my students the opportunity to come by during my office hours or to e-mail me or to go to open lab if they are having problems, but I can assure you it’s not really because I enjoy their company. Oddly enough, the students that take advantage of these opportunities usually are the ones that pass my class…not because I keep up with who is coming to pay me visits, but because those are the students that are apparently studying their asses off enough to pass the class.Maybe your instructor is some pathetic moron who has to have validation from his students, but I seriously doubt that is why you are not passing the class. As for the $300 worth of ancillaries…the internet and the library are filled with your heart’s desire of FREE study materials.



• So you can't get an A in anatomy because the books are expensive (I know, I know, those 800+ page, 4-color books should cost at most $50, despite that fact that it costs near a million dollars to the publisher to produce an edition of the book and materials), it takes time to make the study materials (um, what?!), and the prof requires sucking up that you just can't make time for. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that anatomy is a fucking complex and difficult subject, and that the course is likely designed to weed out the students who can't handle the material. I can't wait to see how much you complain about your physiology class.



• Boo effin’ hoo, Anatomy Stu. I can hear your whining from across state lines and it sounds just like the losers who drag down my class average then keep popping up in my lab semester after semester with the same lame work ethic. I am ROTFLMFAO that you think going to class and studying 30-60 minutes a day is working really hard. Yeah, that’s definitely what your professor meant by “time intensive.” News flash, Snowflake: nobody ever got an A in anatomy keeping those hours. As for your possibly paranoid delusion that your professor favors students who show up to his office hours, here’s another news flash: anatomy is the least subjective discipline around. If you get the answers right you get an A no matter whose office couch you’ve been lounging on. So either man up and study more (the only secret to success in anatomy), or face the fact you don’t have what it takes to do well in the course and get the hell out of the classroom. Permanently.



• The average on my first test was 55%, on the second it was 37%. College is not high school. I do curve the grades some, but fewer than half of my students will pass. Most have already dropped. I have one student who took the same course from me two years ago and dropped. He is doing well now. He said he finally realized that he had to do all the homework and study for hours and hours every week. He has nothing but disdain for the students who are complaining about how hard the course is. For the class you are in, you probably should drop. Then read the book(s) over the break. Retake it and plan on putting in 1-2 hours six days a week in study time. Anatomy is a killer course because they are weeding out weak students who should not go to medical school. If you can't make a prof's office hours ask for an meeting at another time. If you have to work 40 hour/week don't take a full course load.If you do don't complain about getting low grades.

Office Mate Results.

Obama: 58%

Biden: 28%

Palin: 21%

McCain: 3%

Why Do We Allow Students On the Site?

Okay. So. I'm a fuckin' student, so I don't deserve any time on this blog. But I need to rant to someone and maybe that someone will understand.

I'm in an Anatomy class. The average, out of 600+ students, of our first test was a 68%. The average of the second test was 64%.

The instructor makes my head hurt. He's good lookin'. He lectures extremely well. But I don't think that I can get an A in the class. Ever. Why?

First day of class: we have a $250 textbook. He throws $300+ of "highly recommended" study materials onto that pile. Great, if you can afford them. I can't.

The first day is mostly taken up with how important /time/ is to the class. This class is time-intensive. Understandably. Normally, I take around 30-60 minutes per day to study for this class, on top of the hours it takes to make the study materials and the fact that I should obviously attend all lectures. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

According to the prof, the people who ace his class are the ones that come to his office hours. Like, all of them. "They don't even have to have a question! Sometimes they just come and study!" he exclaims. That's nice. I can't come to his office hours because I work full-time on top of studying. I have emailed him a few questions -- weeks ago -- he never answered. Maybe I should set up an out-of-hours office appointment...just to study?!!

I've never been the paranoid student who thought that Prof X was out to get them. No, it's more subtle than that. I think that my Anatomy professor makes his tests too fucking hard because he needs that gaggle of (mostly female) students to follow him around. He can't face the fact that he might have office hours where no one shows up; let alone the dozens of students that he forces to show up, because they couldn't pass the class any other way.

Admit -- I'm going to fail the class. Actually, I'm going to drop it at the last minute and then re-take it with, apparently, the same prof. As a student, I feel like I've worked my ass off - yet I'm sure that many professors/teachers would disagree with me. Funny how that works, eh?

How Happy Are We Supposed to Be When Our Colleagues Want to Leave. Big Thirsty Replies.

It was a very big mail night and the replies to this week's Big Thirsty were especially diverse. We've tried to capture the flava of the replies and now we'd like to step aside so that you may enjoy them:

• Egads, more job-hopping gumdrop unicorns. I feel for this week's Big Thirsty writer. I have a handy-dandy job rec letter on my computer just for this purpose. It's always someone I barely know, someone who's put all of 6-18 months into the career, and the most I can say is, "This person certainly does wear pants to work most days," and "He didn't cry too much at the first faculty meeting." I know it's a pain in the ass to hire again, but get used to it.



• I am envious when a colleague is looking. I'm married, while some of my junior colleagues are not, and I have kids. My kids are in school, soccer, doing plays, and my whole family are attached to the community and the college in a variety of ways. The machinations around me making a move are much different than for someone who doesn't have those attachments.



• Of COURSE you write the letters. What kind of a jackass are you to take out your own insecurities on colleagues who are clearly more ambitious than you?
  


• I guess the word "secretively" set my teeth on edge. I'm always uncomfortable when I'm asked not to reveal something that seems to me to be a public matter. If one of my colleagues is leaving, it affects everyone in the department, and sometimes quite a few people in the college. I would not want to hold that information back when the actual work of the department is at risk of a late departing faculty member. (You know what kind of candidates you get when you place one of those summer job ads, don't you? It's the person who literally couldn't get a job anywhere else.) So, to my colleagues here - DON'T ASK ME TO BE YOUR HUSH-BUDDY.
  


• Oh, for crying out loud. Can you really not see how -MANY- of your colleagues are treated like serfs? Even if you have tenure, seniority, and a nice cushy position well insulated from reality, THEY sure don't!! Can you possibly be unable to remember how much your life changed, when you got tenure?!? Write the blasted letters of recommendation for them, and be cheerful about it, and keep your mouth shut about it, or else arrange for the powers-that-be to grant your junior colleagues tenure immediately. It might also help to provide an environment that stimulates them!
  


• Job season CAN be intoxicating. I know what today's writer is talking about. I have a junior colleague in the same situation who I've sort of adopted. She sends me job ads in her field, emails me pictures of parks and neighborhoods she finds on Google Street View, and generally she's started to piss me off. I don't want to stand in her way, but her glee at departing this place has given me a little pause. I like it here. I don't think she's given it a chance. She lives 40 miles away - not for any good reason - she never attends college functions, she has a chip in her shoulder about how her departmental colleagues don't fall all over her very obscure publications. She's had a negative feeling about the place from the beginning, and despite having never spent any real time with any administrator, calls them "snakes" and "rats" anyway. I guess my tolerance for this is pretty high because when she asked for a letter, I just sighed and said, "Okay."



• I think at that ratio, 2 to 8, I might be tempted to break confidentiality and talk to the department chair. It may be wrong, but it's your department. You're going to be the one who has to deal with the aftermath in April or May when your little darlings give their big news that they're going to Slightly Better Located Uni or Closer to BFF College.



• If a quarter of your faculty wants to leave, then you're as likely as not the fool in this conundrum. Healthy and happy departments simply do NOT have this kind of turnover.



• While you have your junior colleagues trust & attention, you have a responsibility to find out what the issues are. Are they being pulled away or pushed away? Don't take the first answer, or the second, or the third. Only then will you know if you need to fix something internally (is it really that all that collegial?) or fix something in the hiring process (hire a better fit) or a combination of the two (the most likely). If you don't take on the responsibility to get to the bottom of this, and do it now before they announce their departure, you can expect to be eternally hiring and rehiring.



• Our school is such a mess, EVERYONE is looking for a new job.

Big Thirsty: Even If You're Happy Where You Are, Do You Envy Those Colleagues Racing Into the Job Market? (Especially When You Have to Help?)

I'm one of 8 pretty collegial colleagues at a pleasant liberal arts college in the Midwest. I've been here 5 years and enjoy my job. This year two of the more junior faculty have come to me on their own - quite secretively - asking me to write them job letters.

They're in their second and third years here, and both are actively on the job market. Both have been very clear that they don't want me to spill the beans to anyone, especially our chair. I like them both, but do remember their searches being rather involved, long hours, quite the ordeals. And I do remember the great relief we all felt when we had our new unit in place - for what we thought was a long time.

I don't mind writing the letters, but I do feel a little bad about keeping the secret. It's my department, too, of course, and we'll take a big hit if 25% of our full timers evaporate suddenly this year.

And I must admit that when the second one came to me she dazzled me with her charts and maps and paperwork - all those interesting and delicious jobs ads, those bucolic spots, the university on the coast, a college in the mountains, a prestigious department in New York! I don't want to move, really, but seeing my younger colleagues all fired up by the possibilities made me a bit envious.

Q: So I have these letters to write, and I was wondering about others in my position. Do you write the letters happily, do you keep the secret from the powers that be, do you have any resentment about the possible job search committees you're bound to be assigned to next year to replace your pals? Are you envious of their wanderlust?

A: Send replies here.

Mathlete Minnie Snarks Out A Young Snowflack.

Hi,

My name is Snowy Snowflack and i am in your XXX class. Due to unfortunate circumstances on my part i was not able to hand in my first assignment and i was wondering if there is some way i can make up for it, i understand that this is a late plea, but i have just decided this term to minor in XXX, and it is important for me to reach a certain average, and a zero in a 15% assignment is going to have a great negative impact on my mark. If there is anything i can do to make up for this or part of this, can you please let me know. I am very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you and i hope you understand my situation. Thank you.

Snowy S.

~-~

Dear Snowy,

The course outline is my "contract" with you about how the course will be conducted -- what is required of you in terms of assignments, exams, and so forth, and what you will receive in return -- typically grades.

Per the course outline: "a 2% per day penalty begins at the start of class for late assignments." This assignment was due June 11th and it is now August 6th. Fifty-six days have elapsed. Thus, your penalty would be 56 * 2% = 112%. If you handed it in now, you would actually OWE me marks from another assignment or your final exam to make up the difference.

I would suggest not handing it in and taking the zero. If, as you claim, "it is important for me to reach a certain average," then I would suggest being more cognizant of the deadlines stated in the course outline (i.e. course "contract") in the future -- there are no more opportunities to receive marks in this course.

Yours,

Mathlete Minnie

Menace.

I'm a second year TA, so I'm admittedly new to this. I have already seen the slackers, the snowflakes, and all of the other characters that make us question the future of education. However, I anticipated those problems, and I'm prepared to deal with them as I need to.

What I never saw coming was the student that started following me around campus, and eventually, following me home after my evening class. He'd stay a few blocks behind me, but it was undeniable that it was happening. And once I was in my apartment, I'd see him standing outside, sometimes up to an hour.

Now the school has arranged for a security guard to meet me after class and walk me to the bus station. I don't have a car. I live two miles from campus, and the walk home was often the only time of the day I officially had to myself. I loved that time, and I needed it. Now, that's gone. My rights are gone, my comfort and security are gone. And now I have one more thing to be worried about, on top of teaching two different courses while earning a PhD in a difficult program.

I don't know what his motivation is. I don't know if it's a silly crush on the teacher that went too far, or if there's a more violent reason behind it. I just know I was a lot happier before this happened.

I miss the walks home. I miss not having to look over my shoulder. I miss thinking that the "worst" student was the cheater, or the liar, or the perpetually late kid. I can't even say I hate this particular student. I just hate what he's done.

On Assessment.

I'm a full time faculty member at a large state school in the southeast. Recently a colleague of mine sent the following thoughts on assessment to a large listserv inside the university. I think it's brilliant, and wanted to share it.

We have recently been asked to participate in a school-wide assessment campaign this fall. I questioned a couple of people on the wording of the request and was told that if I did not enthusiastically embrace the concept of assessment, I lacked both “virtue” and a “commitment to your students.” Wow! Talk about a “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” point of view! I am sorry, but I am not convinced that assessment is necessary, let alone virtuous. I believe assessment is a product of over-administration in education.

When administrators (most of whom haven’t amassed enough teaching experience to fill a hobbit’s thimble) claim that we can’t know whether or not our students are learning without assessment, they are essentially stating the following: 1) you are not an expert in what you do and can’t make improvements without outside pressure and 2) you don’t care and won’t make improvements without outside pressure.

If assessment is all about accountability, then why don’t we get reciprocal accountability? I have been told by several people that at least some of the administrators here consider faculty “the enemy.” Some consider faculty a bunch of pot-smoking, sandal-wearing, leftist, free-love hippies out to milk a cushy existence out of the hard-working American’s tax dollar and it is the duty of the administration to prevent that. If assessment is designed to make faculty accountable for what we do in the classroom, why can’t faculty assess the administration? I suggest that no college administrator's contract should be extended without approval by at least 60% of the faculty. If a college president could not achieve that approval rating, not only the president, but any of the executive team hired by the president should have to step down. Now that is accountability! I have said before, and I say again, the best way to serve the needs and interests of the students is to serve the needs and interests of the faculty.

If assessment is all about excellence, then why not consider other paths to excellence? Southwest Airlines, Google, Microsoft, and others have all shown tremendous profits, innovation, and creativity by focusing on staff satisfaction and happiness. How about this: take 10 faculty members and keep everything the same (salary, work load, etc.) and ADD assessment duties to their lives while taking 10 faculty members and giving them a 25% raise while reducing work load and providing adequate professional support (better offices, parking, professional development, etc). At the end of two years, study the student outcomes and see which batch of students fared better. How is that for generating some DATA? The appetite for data is only strong when the decisions about power and paradigm have already been made.

The Other Folks in the Boat.

Everyone talks about their snowflakes, and I have many, but let me a take a moment to shout out to my fellow comrades in arms.

• Professor “I’m coasting to Retirement” – All of us junior faculty are painfully aware that you are the lead faculty member and it is your prerogative to set course policies (textbooks used, labs required, etc.). Mainly this is due to you telling us this repeatedly at department meetings. However, just because you don’t want to change any of your teaching materials, doesn’t mean the field has stopped changing. Please take a moment to look outside of your office and realize that the 21st century has come and we need to catch up with it.
  


• Professor “Golden Load” – It is nice when class schedules are divided up by seniority. I wish I could demand a schedule that worked around my Wednesday golf game and my Monday three-martini lunch. No, I trudge on with whatever classes are left, pulling together something that won’t keep my 2 year old in daycare too much, or cost me a small fortune in wasted gas… well, at least I am not an adjunct, sorry guys, but we all have to get the best schedule we can.
  


• Dean “Touchy-Feely” – You are right, the last time you evaluated my class it was a performance put on for you. I have tried for years to show you how my highly technical field needs to be taught, but you continue to tell me there isn’t enough “active learning” in my class. Dear God, what the hell do you think lab is… my class has a minimum of 50% active learning (which is probably more than your beloved English courses), but I cannot win. So this year, rather than fight, I took a whole class and threw the content out the window, focusing on the way my students felt about the material (as if that changes the answers somehow). You loved it, but my students came back the next day and told me it was a waste of time.
  


• Vice-President “Your Ass is Mine” – Ah, the reason we have tenure. I know you don’t like me, but then again, I don’t like you either. I do respect you in a weird way; you know your job (campus gargoyle and President’s hatchet man) and you do it extremely well. I wish the Deans would push back every once in a while… but until then, remember what your mom told you about honey and vinegar.
  


• President “I Care About You” – Actions speak louder than words, dude. Take a minute to stop and say hi to me when you run through my hall with prospective donors and I might be apt to believe you care about the faculty. You might get us lots of money, but you sure as hell don’t warrant my respect when you cannot bother to learn half the faculty’s names. I do a pretty good job with a few hundred new names a semester, you should be able to handle the couple hundred we have total.
  

Musty Marty from Madison Offers Some Eval Tricks.

Chart-Making Charles is right on the money. But so much more can be said. Here's a short tutorial in improving your (numerical) course evals:

1. Give high grades in general, like some of Charles' TAs.


2. Teach directly to your tests. Give many examples, especially in physics, math, etc. Always pass out a practice test 3 days before the "real" test that is nearly identical to it. Then go over said practice test in great detail during class the day before the test.


3. Give generous partial credit for anything and everything. After all, we all know the students "tried real hard'.


4. Give extra credit opportunities that have nothing to do with the substance of the course. Anything that is turned in gets full credit.


5. One week before you give course evals, adjust the grading scale in the students' favor. Tell them you are going to "curve" the grades. They have no idea what this means, but they believe that it is a very good thing for them.


6. Above all, never really challenge them. "Cover" a lot of "ground" in class so they think they are learning a lot, but only stretch them slightly past what was expected in high school. Never require creative thinking or originality; encourage them to mimic your many examples.

We're Ready to Hit the Road When They Start Throwing Shit.

"Carrie" is a professional student who was getting her degree in Liberal Studies. You know the one; it's the degree where a student has 300 credit hours in completely unrelated material because she could not choose a major and stick with it.

Carrie decided to dabble in Computer Science, which I teach. On each test, she wrote irate comments such as "you didn't tell us this would be on the test; what kind of question is this; how are we supposed to know how to do this?"

One of the more memorable questions she disapproved of was where I asked the students to relate the material in this course to material they would have picked up in a 101 level course. Boy, did that set Carrie off. I had dared to ask questions that were not in the book or notes. So, Carrie demanded a detailed study guide that listed every possible question I would ask. I refused. She said that I had to give her what she demanded because she was paying for the course. Finally, Carrie threw her final exam at me on the last day.

I considered that a physical threat. I told the Dean I would never be in a room with her again.

The reason I hate Carrie so much is that she wasn't a 19 year old with temper control problems. She was a 50 year old bitter bitch; she was living on student aid; she was wasting resources pursuing a non-degree. And, when she signed up for my classes the next term, the Dean just mumbled and dismissed me from his office when I complained. I think Carrie is dangerous; she's going to snap one day, but I will not be there. I resigned.

(Carrie was just one of the straws.)